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WEEKLY August 25 – 31, 2018
Slimmer. Fitter. Less stressed.
How a positive mind really can create a healthier body
Science and technology news www.newscientist.com US jobs in science
No3192 US$6.99 CAN$6.99
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A BRIDGE TOO FARLessons from Genoa
HALF NEANDERTHAL, HALF DENISOVAN Astounding ancient hybrid discovered
PLUS RUSSIA’S MYSTERY SATELLITE / ORGANS IN SPACE / GLYPHOSATE AND CANCER / SCIENTIFIC AFRICAN / LUCID DREAMING / REVERSING AGING / OLDEST GALAXIES
FIRST LIFEIt happened much, much
earlier than we thought
THE END OF MONEYHidden costs of
a cash-free world
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25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 1
CONTENTSnewscientist.com/issue/3192
Leaders
3 The poorest will suffer if the cashless dream fails. All bridges should have structural redundancy
News
4 THIS WEEK Genoan bridge collapse. Life began earlier than we thought. Measles outbreak
6 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Is Russian satellite a weapon? Huge ancient monument in Kenya. Making universal blood. Half-Neanderthal, half-Denisovan teenager. AI finds hazardous lead pipes in Flint. The galaxy’s many water worlds. Drug boosts lucid dreaming. Batteries made with bacteria. Autism linked to lingering insecticide. Old galaxies discovered next door. Organs in space. Psychedelic brew mimics near-death experiences
16 IN BRIEF How to break spaghetti in two. Fish eat their eggs to have better babies. Mean robot overlord
Analysis
20 INSIGHT Gains in life expectancy in the UK are faltering – here are six possible reasons why
22 COMMENT Keep population control out of the climate change fight. All hail Africa’s mega-journal
23 ANALYSIS Does a commonly used weedkiller cause cancer?
Features
26 The maverick putting
ageing in reverse Geneticist George Church on how to turn back the clock
28 Mind over matter How a positive mind really can create a healthier body
34 Ice sage The unschooled Scotsman who first explained Earth’s recurrent cold spells
36 The end of money Hidden costs of a cash-free world
Culture
42 Ocean plastic Eye-popping show of marine anatomy
43 Emotional ignorance Why we need a road map of the emotions. PLUS: This week’s cultural picks
44 Seeking Sandra What happens when AI isn’t really artificial?
Regulars
24 APERTURE
A helping hand for lemurs52 LETTERS
Ice giant mission55 MAKE
Slam dunk the junk56 FEEDBACK
Jobs lost to avian intelligence57 THE LAST WORD
Load of rubbish
On the cover
4 A bridge too far
Lessons from Genoa
5 First life
It happened much, much earlier than we thought
36 The end of money
Hidden costs of a cash-free world
7 Half Neanderthal,
half Denisovan
Astounding ancient hybrid discovered
28 Slimmer. Fitter. Less stressed
How a positive mind really can create a healthier body
Russia’s mystery satellite (6). Organs in space (14). Glyphosate and cancer (23). Scientific African (22). Lucid dreaming (10). Reversing ageing (26). Oldest galaxies (13)
News Life on Earth began much earlier than we thought 5Volume 239 No 3192
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SECOND EDITION OF
THE BIG QUESTIONS
LEADERS
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 3
ON THE same day that Donald Trump was elected US president, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi took to national TV to make a stunning announcement. From midnight, the country’s two highest denomination banknotes would no longer be legal tender. The 500 and 1000 rupee notes accounted for 86 per cent of currency supply in a country where roughly 90 per cent of transactions are done in cash.
Modi’s stated intention was to curb what he called “black money”. People had 50 days to swap their old cash for new at banks. It was hoped that by capping how much each person
could exchange, criminals would struggle to launder suitcases of banknotes.
Plenty of people around the world think having less cash would benefit society. After all, counterfeiting aside, cash can be unsafe – in terms of being easily stolen – and it also results in transactions that are hard to keep track of, which can lead to the oiling of corruption. The Better Than Cash Alliance, a UN-based partnership of some 60 governments, companies and international organisations, is pushing this line.
Yet in the aftermath of Modi’s overnight demonetisation,
sociologists documented how it was poor people who were disproportionately affected. Replacement notes turned out to be in short supply and poor people found it hardest to get to banks and trade in old for new.
The trend towards less-cash societies keeps spreading and strengthening, especially in richer countries. A few central banks are considering whether they should issue digital analogues of cash (see page 36). But as India’s experiment hints, this tech trend presents risks as well as opportunities. Unless the phasing out of cash is done carefully, it is the poorest who will suffer. ■
Out of pocketIf the cashless dream goes sour, it will hurt poor people most
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AUTHORITIES in Italy are investigating what went wrong to make Genoa’s Morandi motorway bridge collapse last week, killing 43 people (see page 4).
Bridges rarely just give way. They normally show signs of wear and tear, such as cracks or corrosion, long before they fall apart. Even then a collapse doesn’t normally follow and there is
plenty of time to organise a fix. Most suspension bridges, such
as San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, use cables to support them, but the few on the Morandi bridge were encased in concrete. This contributes to a lack of structural redundancy, and if one component fails, it can have a disproportionate effect on the bridge if other parts can’t take the strain.
Undoubtedly, signs the bridge was in need of repair were either ignored or missed, but a better bridge would probably have lasted longer. The design turned out to be an architectural dead end, and luckily few other bridges were ever built like it.
Modern bridges have greater structural redundancy, which is a good thing. Even components in more recent structures fail, but this redundancy keeps a failure from becoming a disaster. ■
A bridge too far
EditorialEditor Emily WilsonManaging editor Rowan HooperArt editor Craig MackieEditor at large Jeremy Webb
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4 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
THIS WEEK
ITALY is still reeling from the collapse
of a large portion of a bridge in Genoa
last week, killing at least 43 people.
Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte
declared a state of emergency in the
region and has made €5 million
available to help with the aftermath.
“These are unacceptable tragedies
that should not happen in a modern
society. This government will do
everything to prevent such tragedies
from happening again,” said Conte in
a press conference.
Harrowing footage and tales
from survivors are at odds with the
precision and reliability we have come
to expect from modern engineering.
It has left many asking what went
wrong – and if the same thing could
happen to other bridges.
Completed in 1967, the Genoese
bridge was made primarily of
pre-stressed concrete, which is
strengthened by high-tension steel
cables running through it. It is part of
a motorway that connects the city to
local ports and hooks up the Italian
and French rivieras. On 14 August,
a massive tower and a 200-metre
section of road collapsed onto
railway lines, a river and a warehouse
45 metres below, taking dozens of
vehicles with them.
More than 400 people were
evacuated, including those who live
in housing blocks under one of the
pillars. Firefighters have been
searching for survivors and bodies.
It is not yet known why the bridge
collapsed. At the time, work was
under way to firm up the bridge’s
foundations, and there was
torrential rain. Some engineers
have suggested that the maintenance
work may have been a factor in the
collapse, whereas others are
suggesting there were fundamental
design or construction flaws.
“Concrete is a fantastic material
that can last for many years, but if
it’s poor quality it becomes porous,
and the tensioning steel corrodes,”
says Michael Byfield at the University
of Southampton, UK.
High-strength concrete normally
HUNDREDS of people have died as
a result of flooding in the southern
Indian state of Kerala.
Since monsoon season began in
June, more than 200,000 people have
had to abandon their homes and move
to emergency relief camps. “We’re
witnessing something that has never
happened before in the history of
Kerala,” Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief
minister for the region, told local news.
More than 930 people have died
across India this monsoon season.
Kerala has been hit particularly hard,
with more than 350 killed. Officials
say many of the deaths were in
landslides triggered by the floods.
Kerala has 44 rivers running
through it, and the state authorities
have been criticised for not gradually
releasing water from 80 local dams.
Instead, water was only discharged
once the reservoirs were full,
exacerbating the situation.
Floods kill 350 people in Kerala
Record measles outbreak in Europe
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THE failure of parents to vaccinate
their children has contributed to the
biggest surge in measles cases Europe
has seen in a decade, according to
the World Health Organization.
Across the 53 countries in the
region, there have been at least
37 deaths and more than 41,000
cases in the first half of this year,
already nearly twice the 23,927
cases recorded in the whole of 2016.
More than half this year’s cases
have been in Ukraine, where measles
vaccination coverage has been
plummeting over the past decade.
In 2016, vaccination rates dropped
to 50 per cent. The WHO warns that
as soon as fewer than 95 per cent of
eligible children receive vaccination,
measles can spread rapidly.
England has seen 807 cases
this year, 281 of them in London.
Before vaccination began in 1968,
the UK reported roughly half a
million cases a year.
has a pH of about 12. At this highly
alkali level, steel embedded in the
concrete won’t corrode. However,
if the concrete mix contains too much
water, or drainage doesn’t function
properly, it can become porous, which
results in the pH dropping over time.
Below a pH level of 9, the steel can
corrode, weakening the structure
of the bridge. This can also happen
if cracks allow water to seep in.
“The bridge doesn’t have a lot of
redundancies, so if one cable goes,
it could be enough to take the whole
bridge down,” says Paul Jackson at
engineering firm Ramboll, who helped
to refurbish the bridge in the 1990s.
It is hard to tell if the steel inside
concrete is corroding and there is
always an element of judgement,
says Jackson. “The Genoa bridge is
unusual because bridges tend to give
more warning before collapsing, such
as revealing cracks,” he says.
Genoan bridge collapseDuring a recent project on the
Hammersmith Flyover, a similar bridge
in London, Jackson and his colleagues
attached acoustic sensors to the
bridge that detected when strands
from the steel cable later broke.
“Normally this happens so rarely you
can’t be sure if your sensor is working,
but with Hammersmith they kept
pinging a lot,” says Jackson. This
meant that extra steel cables had to
be added to the exterior, resulting
in a lengthy and costly repair job.
Around Europe, many bridges
are in a poor state. A report in France
from earlier this year said that a third
of the country’s road bridges are in
need of repair, with about 7 per cent
being at risk of eventual collapse.
And a report from Germany’s Federal
Highway Research Institute last
year found that more than 12 per
cent of Germany’s road bridges
were in bad condition.
In the US, a recent report
determined that 54,000 of the
613,000 bridges surveyed were
structurally deficient. These
bridges are crossed 174 million
times each day. Timothy Revell
“Concrete is fantastic and can last many years, but if it’s poor quality, the tensioning steel corrodes”
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 5
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
THE shared ancestor of every organism now on the planet lived at least 3.9 billion years ago – adding weight to theories that life started 100 million years earlier than we thought, at a time when Earth was still being pummelled by meteorites.
That’s according to a study that has combined genetic and fossil evidence to build a timeline of crucial shifts in the early evolution of life. The study also sheds new light on the birth of complex cells, which today make up all animals and plants.
For the first few billion years of Earth’s history, the only life present was single-celled microorganisms. Unlike the large plants and animals that arose in the past 600 million years, such as trilobites and dinosaurs, these microbes left few fossils – so understanding life’s early history has been tricky.
To find out more, Holly Betts at the University of Bristol, UK, and her colleagues combined two sources of evidence. They compared the sequences of 29 genes across 102 species to build a family tree that showed how they were all related, and the order in which new groups split away from their relatives.
The researchers then added some dates to this tree, taken from the geological record. This enabled them to estimate when the various groups evolved and parted company. For instance, they knew that life could be no older than 4.52 billion years because that is when a rock the size of Mars slammed into Earth, forming the moon. The impact was so severe that the planet’s entire surface melted. “Nothing could have survived it,” says team member Davide Pisani, also at the University of Bristol.
The result is a timeline of the first 3 billion years of life, from the ancestor of all modern life to the first complex animals (Nature Ecology & Evolution, doi. org/cs5q). “We can go very
deep in time, which we never thought was possible,” says Pisani.
“I think they’ve really made the most sincere and honest effort yet to actually get a coherent picture of the history of life,” says Bill Martin at the University of Düsseldorf in Germany.
One major finding is that the most recent organism that all existing life is related to – known as the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA – lived at least 3.9 billion years ago. There is tentative support for life to have existed this early in our planet’s history. Some have suggested that traces of carbon in 4.1-billion-
year-old rocks are signs of early life. Similar traces were found in 3.95-billion-year-old rocks in 2017. And another 2017 study claimed to have found fossilised single-celled organisms from 3.77 billion years ago. But all these findings are disputed.
Nevertheless, Greg Fournier at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says the new date for LUCA is reasonable. This means life probably formed relatively quickly, within 600 million years of the moon-creating impact, when big meteorites were still battering the planet.
Supercharged life
LUCA gave rise to two groups of single-celled microorganisms called bacteria and archaea. This split happened at least 3.4 billion years ago, the study finds.
Later on, more-complex cells evolved – one of the most crucial evolutionary events ever. Compared with bacteria and archaea, these “eukaryote” cells
are larger, with membrane-bound compartments and tiny, energy-supplying mitochondria.
All animals, plants and fungi are eukaryotes, and if these cells had not evolved, we could never have existed. The timeline suggests these cells first appeared at least 1.84 billion years ago.
It was thought that eukaryotes evolved in response to rising oxygen levels, but this finding suggests this might not have been the case, as the first atmospheric oxygen turned up much earlier – 2.4 billion years ago. However, it does not rule out a link, as there was little oxygen at first and levels later rose in fits and starts.
The timing of the eukaryotes’ origin is curious because it took place almost exactly when the study found that microbes called alphaproteobacteria evolved. The mitochondria inside eukaryotic cells were once free-living alphaproteobacteria, which were somehow swallowed by an archaean that then gave rise to the first eukaryotes.
The implication is that acquiring mitochondria was the key step in eukaryote evolution, says Pisani. This then spurred a massive evolution of diversity among eukaryotic cells, he says.
Martin and his colleagues have made a similar argument on physical grounds, suggesting that the first eukaryotes could only have evolved large, complex cells once they had mitochondria to supercharge them.
However, Fournier suspects the timings might be off. He says mitochondria are quite different from their alphaproteobacteria ancestors, “so they should be substantially younger”. ■
Born on a battered EarthLife’s crucial early steps are being rewritten, finds Michael Marshall
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Early Earth may not have been
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“This is the best attempt yet to actually get a coherent picture of the history of life on Earth”
6 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Chelsea Whyte
UNUSUAL manoeuvres by a Russian satellite have sparked fears in the US. On 14 August, Yleem Poblete at the US Department of State expressed concerns at a UN conference on disarmament held in Switzerland.
“We are concerned with what appears to be very abnormal behaviour by a declared ‘space apparatus inspector’. We don’t know for certain what it is, and there is no way to verify it,” she told the conference.
Poblete referenced previous statements by Russian officials about programmes to develop anti-satellite systems, and said the US has no way to tell if the satellite in question is a weapon. A Russian delegate at the conference said Poblete’s remarks were unfounded, according to Reuters.
Based on the satellite’s orbital changes – which are tracked by the US and made publicly available – it is hard to tell whether the manoeuvres have an innocuous explanation, says Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.
The satellite in question, Kosmos-2519, launched in October 2017 and then deployed two smaller satellites. Since then, Kosmos-2519 has made a series of orbital adjustments, including a rendezvous with those smaller satellites in December. A further flurry of activity began in late June, when it entered an orbit closer to Earth.
The Russian satellite operators could simply be testing their ability to identify space debris,
but they might also be trialling techniques for monitoring other satellites in low orbit. “It could be for that kind of spying,” says McDowell. “It could also be testing out Earth-observing cameras from different heights. That seems like a weird thing to do, but who knows?”
The day after the satellite lowered its orbit, one of the smaller satellites did so too. That isn’t a coincidence, says McDowell, but the connection between the two is puzzling. It may be that Russia simply decided to move the satellites one after the other. Or it could be that one
of the satellites was observing the other and that test is now complete, so they have been put into lower orbits to speed up their eventual re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
“We just have to wait and see. We’ve got the popcorn out and we’re checking the orbital data every day,” says McDowell.
The lowering of orbits is a much less provocative manoeuvre than attempting to move one satellite close to another, says Laura Grego, a space security expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A satellite able to close in on another could potentially carry a weapon, but it could also perform more benign tasks like inspection, refuelling or repair, she says.
Without knowing how the Russian satellite is equipped, it is fair to say the US can’t rule out the possibility it carries a test weapon. Poblete said that these manoeuvres are “inconsistent with anything seen before from on-orbit inspection or space situational awareness capabilities”, but McDowell says they are merely unusual, not unprecedented.
Russian officials haven’t announced why this satellite moved, but US officials may be jumping to the worst-case scenario. “At some level, that’s their job. But they’ve jumped from ‘we don’t know’ to rampant paranoia,” says McDowell. ■
US fears over Russian satellite
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“ There is no evidence that anyone buried at the site was more important than anyone else”
EXCAVATIONS at eastern Africa’s
oldest and biggest cemetery offer
a new perspective on why ancient
humans built large monuments.
The Lothagam North Pillar site is
a communal cemetery built about
5000 years ago near Lake Turkana,
Kenya, by the region’s first herders.
At the site, there are 1.5-metre-tall
stone pillars, nine stone circles and a
Vast ancient site built by equal society
vast 700-square-metre raised
platform, together with the remains
of at least 580 people.
Researchers tend to think such
large structures were the work of
stable, complex, hierarchical societies
with surplus resources, arguing that
they were often a way for a chief to
advertise their power.
But excavations at the Lothagam
North Pillar site suggest this wasn’t
the case here. The burials include
people of both sexes and all ages, and
there is little evidence that anyone at
the site was treated differently after
death. Most skeletons were adorned
with ornaments such as ostrich shell
beads and rings made from hippo
ivory (PNAS, doi.org/cs58).
“There is no evidence that anyone
was more important than anyone else,
that there was a chief,” says Katherine
Grillo at the University of Florida in
Gainesville, who co-directed the
excavation.
It seems that the builders were
small groups of mobile herders who
came together to undertake the huge
task of digging out the cemetery site.
“This is clearly beyond the scale of
something constructed by an
extended family,” says Grillo.
So why did the herders go to such
lengths to build the cemetery?
They had moved into the region at a
time of great environmental change –
water levels in Lake Turkana had
dropped by 55 metres, for example.
Grillo and her colleagues think the
herders built the cemetery as a place
to interact and strengthen social
networks in the face of challenging
conditions. Alison George ■
Kosmos-2519 launched on the
Russian rocket Soyuz 2-1v–
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 7
A SLIVER of bone from a cave in Russia is at the centre of what may be the biggest archaeological story of the year. The bone belonged to an ancient human who had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. “Denny” is the only first-generation hybrid hominin ever found.
“My first reaction was disbelief,” says Viviane Slon of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
The find is either a stunning stroke of luck or a hint that hominins interbred more often than we thought. It may even suggest that extinct groups like Neanderthals did not die out, but were absorbed by our species.
In prehistory, members of our species interbred with at least two other ancient humans: the Neanderthals and the mysterious Denisovans, who are known only from fragments of bone and teeth discovered in Denisova cave, Russia. Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred too.
These interbreeding events
were thought to be rare. “The likelihood of actually finding a [first-generation] hybrid has always been considered infinitesimally low,” says Katerina Harvati-Papatheodorou at the University of Tübingen, Germany.
A few years ago, archaeologists found a 90,000-year-old bone fragment in Denisova cave.
Samantha Brown, then at the University of Oxford, discovered that it came from a hominin by examining the proteins preserved inside it. Her team nicknamed the hominin “Denny”. Based on the structure of the bone, Denny died at about 13 years of age.
Slon and her colleagues have now examined Denny’s DNA, discovering that Denny was female – and she had astonishing parentage. Her DNA was almost 50:50 Neanderthal and Denisovan, arranged in a tell-tale way. Our
DNA comes in paired strands called chromosomes, one from each parent. In Denny’s case, each pair had one Neanderthal and one Denisovan chromosome, with very little mixing. She was the daughter of parents from different species (Nature, doi.org/cs64).
Denny’s mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from mothers, is Neanderthal. Therefore, her mother was Neanderthal and her father Denisovan.
Only 23 ancient hominins have had their genomes sequenced. Yet Denny is not the first with recent shared ancestry. There is also “Oase 1”, a member of our species who lived 37,000 years ago in what is now Romania. They had a Neanderthal ancestor just four to six generations earlier.
If interbreeding were rare, we should not have found these individuals so easily, says Svante Pääbo, also of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “It suggests that these groups, when they met, mixed quite freely with each other.”
This doesn’t mean Neanderthals and Denisovans were constantly interbreeding. Their genomes show they were “quite distinct populations”, says Pääbo. They controlled separate territories – the Neanderthals in Europe, the Denisovans in east Asia – and occasionally met at the boundaries. He says the Denisova cave was “a unique area where they met, and then they had no prejudices against each other”.
Pääbo argues that when modern humans expanded from Africa into Europe and Asia, they often interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. This could be why these groups vanished. “Neanderthals and Denisovans may not have become violently extinct, but may have become absorbed into modern human populations.” Michael Marshall ■
COULD blood shortages become a
thing of the past? Bacterial enzymes
from the human gut turn type A blood
into the type universally accepted
for transfusions, and do it more
efficiently than current methods.
Our blood comes in four main
varieties: A, B, AB and O. The red blood
cells in each type are similar in shape,
but they have different sugars on
their surfaces. Red blood cells in
type A host a particular set of these
sugars, with type B having a different
set. AB blood cells carry both A and B
sugars, and type O cells have none.
These sugars can act as antigens,
triggering an immune response. For
instance, transfusing type B blood
into someone with type A can be
fatal. That is what makes anyone with
type O blood a universal donor: there
are none of these antigens. So being
able to strip these sugars from A, B
and AB type blood would be helpful,
effectively making it usable in
transfusions for all.
“We knew that those same sugars
that are on our red blood cells are
also produced on the lining of the
gut wall,” says Steve Withers at the
University of British Columbia,
Canada. So he and his colleagues
started searching for bacteria in
human faeces that might make
enzymes that let them feed on
and break down gut wall sugars.
Analysing bacterial genes, they
found a family of enzymes that help
gut bacteria harvest the sugars. When
the team combined the enzymes
with type A blood, the sugars were
removed from the blood cells,
resulting in type O blood. The process
is 30 times more efficient than an
existing one involving other enzymes.
The bacterial enzymes will have to
go through more safety testing before
they can be used in blood destined
for human transfusions, but it is a
promising step, says Withers. He
presented the work at a meeting of
the American Chemical Society in
Boston this week. Chelsea Whyte ■
Prehistoric teenager was offspring of two species
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. ET
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/CC
BY
4.0
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“ The likelihood of finding a first-generation hybrid has always been considered infinitesimally low”
Bacteria hold key to universal donor blood
The tiny sliver of bone (seen from
many angles) from “Denny”
8 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Frank Swain
EFFORTS are under way to replace the lead pipes that have been contaminating the water supply in the city of Flint, Michigan. Nobody knows which of the 55,000 properties are directly affected, but an artificially intelligent algorithm can make accurate guesses.
The Flint water crisis began in 2014 when city officials began sourcing water from the local
river instead of the Detroit water system. The water wasn’t treated properly and corroded lead pipes, causing the heavy metal to leach into drinking water.
Residents complained of foul smelling, discoloured water that caused rashes, and were advised to boil tap water before drinking. Paediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha raised the alarm in 2015 when she found herself treating children with abnormally high levels of lead in their blood. A state
of emergency was declared and millions of litres of bottled water shipped in.
The water supply has now been reconnected to the Detroit water system, but the lead pipes remain.
At the height of the crisis, Google funded a project to help map the affected homes. A team of scientists from various fields and institutions volunteered to help, but quickly realised there was little information available, as many records were missing, incomplete or outdated.
Jacob Abernethy at Georgia Tech and his colleagues built an AI to predict which homes are likely to be connected to a lead pipe. They drew on work by a separate team that digitised old city plans and more than 140,000 handwritten records of building work in the city.
The system catalogues 71 different pieces of information for every property in Flint, such as the age, value and location of the home. By training itself on properties where lead levels had been measured, the algorithm could predict other homes that were likely to have lead pipes.
Before the AI was developed, homes were selected for pipe replacement based on educated guesses and around 20 per cent of the pipes dug up turned out not
to be made of lead, wasting time and money. “We had no good way of doing it, frankly,” says Michael McDaniel, who was in charge of the initial pipe replacement programme.
Now, the AI system can produce a list of properties suspected to have lead pipes with a 97 per cent success rate. This amounts to a saving of $10 million, enough to make safe an additional 2000 homes.
The team’s AI also revealed that the number of homes affected had been grossly underestimated. A couple of years into the crisis there was a big argument in Congress about how much more money would be needed, says Abernethy. The city had estimated that no more than 10 per cent of homes would be connected to lead pipes, but Abernethy and colleagues found it to be about 40 per cent. This was first predicted by the AI and since then has been supported by ongoing replacements. The revelation helped to secure a further $100 million of federal funding to clean up Flint.
The team has made its data available to the firm now managing Flint’s clean up. It has also created an app that allows engineers to log the results of their surveys to improve the predictions. The model can be applied to other cities as well, says the team. ■
AI hunts down lead pipes in Flint
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“Life could develop in certain near-surface layers on these water worlds, if conditions are appropriate”
PLANETS rich in water, with
atmospheres of steam, oceans
of liquid water and cores of rock
surrounded by solid ice, may be
abundant around distant stars.
An analysis of the almost
4000 known exoplanets estimates
that about 1400 are water-rich
worlds, potentially increasing the
chances that some harbour life.
Water worlds are everywhere in the galaxy
“Life could develop in certain
near-surface layers on these water
worlds, if the pressures, temperatures
and chemical conditions are
appropriate,” says Li Zeng of Harvard
University, who presented his results
at the Goldschmidt geochemistry
conference in Boston last week.
Only a few exoplanets have been
identified as water worlds. Zeng and
his colleagues worked out the likely
compositions of others by analysing
measurements of the radius and
mass of each, and modelling how
they might have evolved.
They relied on a well-established
theory of how planets evolve from the
disc of gas and material that forms
around new stars.
Small rocky planets like Mercury,
Venus, Earth and Mars form in the hot,
“terrestrial” zone closest to the star.
Further out from the star, beyond
a “frost-line”, temperatures are low
enough for water vapour to condense
into ice grains and clump together
into icy planets. Some then become
shrouded by huge quantities of gas,
mostly hydrogen, and end up as giant
planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus
and Neptune.
Around 35 per cent of the known
exoplanets don’t evolve fast enough
and rebound closer to their host
star to form water worlds, the
researchers found. Oceans form from
the melting core, with atmospheres
of steam billowing from the oceans.
On many of the worlds, water may
account for more than half the mass
of the planet, compared with just
0.02 per cent on Earth, says Zeng.
Andy Coghlan ■
Pipework below the city of Flint,
Michigan, is being upgraded
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10 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Alice Klein
EVER wanted to fly? A drug that helps people take charge of their dreams could let you try it from the comfort of your own bed.
A few people have lucid dreams, in which they recognise they are dreaming and steer the path they take. Some others can learn to induce them using cognitive techniques.
The practice is most commonly used to pursue fantasies, but it may also help with nightmares, says Benjamin Baird at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. However, its therapeutic potential has been limited by it often being so hard to achieve.
Now, Baird and his colleagues have developed the most effective method yet for promoting lucid dreams, by combining cognitive training with a drug.
The researchers taught 121 adults aged 19 to 75 a cognitive technique for stimulating lucid dreams. It involves picking a feature of a previous dream called a “dreamsign” that can serve as a reminder to become lucid when encountered again.
The volunteers were then
handed capsules of galantamine, which is used to treat mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. This drug boosts the brain chemical acetylcholine, which boosts memory, but also promotes rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the phase in which dreams are most common.
Each person got a high-dose capsule, a low-dose capsule and a placebo capsule, but they couldn’t tell which was which. On three occasions, they woke in the middle of the night, took a capsule, visualised their dreamsign and went back to sleep.
The high dose was most effective, inducing lucid dreams in 42 per cent of participants. About 27 per cent reported lucid dreams with the low dose and 14 per cent after taking the placebo capsule (PLoS One, doi.org/cs38).
The galantamine-induced dreams varied widely. One participant became lucid while dreaming about falling donkeys and actively flew out of their way. Another fulfilled her fantasy of rollerblading through a shopping centre after realising she was in a dream. The lucid dreams were rated as being more vivid,
complex and emotionally positive than regular dreams.
Common side effects of galantamine in people with Alzheimer’s disease include stomach upsets and tiredness. In the study, 4 per cent of participants reported nausea, 6 per cent experienced insomnia and 2 per cent felt fatigued.
Baird has experimented with galantamine himself. One time he took it, he dreamed about being in an unfamiliar house. As he inspected different objects, he was astonished at how real they felt. “As I ran my hand along a brick wall, for example, I could feel the
coarse texture and the outline of individual bricks,” he says.
The potential therapeutic applications are exciting, says Denholm Aspy at the University of Adelaide in Australia. “This new method finally has the success rate we need to be able to properly do research on lucid dreaming,” he says.
Small studies have already shown that lucid dreaming can be used to treat nightmares, says Aspy. “If you know you’re having a nightmare, it automatically becomes less distressing because you know it’s not real,” he says. “But more than that, you might be able to escape the situation, fly away, confront the threat or even just make yourself wake up.” ■
Drug lets you control dreams
MIL
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“The batteries have a shelf life of about four months and can provide power for up to two days”
A PAPER battery powered by
electron-harvesting bacteria could
one day power environmentally
friendly disposable devices.
Researchers have been working
on paper sensors and circuit boards
for years, but they have mostly been
powered by traditional batteries or
simple chemical reactions. Yang Gao
and Seokheun Choi at Binghamton
Paper batteries use bacteria to make electricity
University in New York created a
paper battery powered by bacteria
to do the job instead.
The battery is made of waxed
paper, with thin layers of metals
and polymers printed on top to
hold bacteria and harvest electrons.
The type of bacteria used, called
exoelectrogens, pull electrons from
the molecules they eat and transfer
them outside their cells.
The battery is freeze-dried to place
the bacteria in a dormant state. It is
packaged with a small pouch of liquid
bacterial food. When the device is
squeezed, the liquid revives the
bacteria and they start eating the
organic material from the pouch.
Through a series of reactions,
electrons from the food are moved
through the bacteria, eventually
being absorbed into the battery,
where they can be used to power
small devices. The batteries have a
shelf life of about four months and
can provide power for up to two days.
The researchers presented their
work on 19 August at a meeting of the
American Chemical Society in Boston.
For now, says Gao, the battery can
only be used to fuel fairly low-power
devices, like a small calculator or an
LED light. But he and Choi hope that
it will someday be used in medical
technologies, like pregnancy tests,
that currently require traditional
batteries and can be hard to dispose
of in a green way.
“If we can provide power without
using conventional batteries, those
devices could be cheaper and more
disposable and environmentally
friendly,” says Gao. Leah Crane ■
Lucid dreams were rated as being
more vivid than the regular sort
Humanity will need the equivalent of 2 Earths to support itself by 2030.
We spend 50% of ourlives daydreaming.
People lying down solve anagrams in
10% less timethan people standing up.
60% of us experience
‘inner speech’ where everyday thoughts take a back-and-forth
conversational style.
About 6 in 100 babies
(mostly boys) are born with an
extra nipple.
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25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 13
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Andy Coghlan
ALTHOUGH it has been banned for decades in many countries, the insecticide DDT may still be influencing whether babies develop autism. A study in Finland has found that pregnant women who show signs of high DDT exposure in their blood seem more likely to have children with autism.
DDT was sprayed in large amounts from the 1940s onwards, to kill disease-carrying mosquitoes. But it was widely banned in Western nations in the 1970s and 1980s, after evidence mounted that it caused cancers in laboratory animals and impaired reproduction in wildlife.
However, the insecticide takes decades to break down, so people are still absorbing it from contaminated water and food. It lodges in the body’s fat, circulates in the blood and is known to pass across the placenta to fetuses during pregnancy.
To see if DDT might be linked to autism, Alan Brown of Columbia University in New York and his colleagues analysed blood samples taken in Finland between 1983 and 2005 from more than a
million women during the early stages of pregnancy. Like in the UK and US, DDT was used widely in Finland before it was banned.
The team screened the samples for DDE – a breakdown product of DDT that persists in the body for a long time – and found that, on average, DDE levels were higher in women who went on to have autistic children.
Women whose children didn’t develop autism had, on average, 811 picograms of DDE present in
each millilitre of their blood, but the average was 1032 picograms in those with autistic children (American Journal of Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.17101129).
Comparing women with and without autistic children who had the highest levels of DDE, the team calculated that high exposure to DDT raises the likelihood of having a child with autism by around a third.
The team also screened the samples for other long-lived pollutants called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which were formerly used as insulation in
electrical transformers. But they found no association between these and autism.
Brown says this tallies with previous research showing that DDE, but not PCBs, have been linked with low birth weight and prematurity – two well-established factors in autism.
However, Brown says the team’s findings shouldn’t concern people. “I would argue against worrying, because even among those with high levels, most won’t have children with autism,” he says.
Further work is needed to determine if DDT really is linked to autism, and whether DDT itself is a cause, or if the two are linked by some other, causative factor.
“Ideally, we’d like to see the same finding replicated in at least three studies to feel confident about the association,” says Kristen Lyall of the A. J. Drexel Autism Institute in Philadelphia.
“I wouldn’t dismiss it as unlikely,” says Rosa Hoekstra of King’s College London. But she says any effect of DDT is very small compared with the genetic factors that contribute to autism.
DDT levels in the countries that have banned it are slowly declining, so pregnant women today are likely to have slightly lower levels of DDE in their blood. But it will be a long time before the DDT used in the 1970s will have fully broken down. ■
Autism linked to lingering insecticide
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“Theoretical models predict that very, very old galaxies should be sprinkled throughout the cosmos”
MEET the Milky Way’s elderly
neighbours. It turns out that the
faint galaxies orbiting our own are
among the oldest in our universe.
These satellite galaxies, including
Ursa Major and Boötes I, are thought
to be more than 13 billion years old.
The closest is probably Segue-1,
some 75,000 light-years away,
says Sownak Bose of the Harvard-
Oldest galaxies in the universe are next door
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Most attempts to find old galaxies
have looked deep into the universe.
Because light takes a long time to
travel to us from the far reaches of
the cosmos, this is equivalent to
looking back in time. Now it turns
out that some of the oldest galaxies
are right on our doorstep (The
Astrophysical Journal, doi.org/cs3w).
“The nice thing about that is that,
because they are relatively near,
we can actually see them,” says Bose.
“Theoretical models predict that very,
very old galaxies should be sprinkled
throughout the cosmos.”
The discovery was made as part of
research into how galaxies grew from
very small ones to the large ones we
see today. These old galaxies formed
in the “cosmic dark ages”, a period
about 380,000 years after the big
bang in which the early, hot universe
had cooled down and become
transparent for the first time.
As part of this, the team studied
satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky
Way. They found two different
populations: very faint ones, which
they think are among the first that
formed, and brighter ones, which
formed later. The Milky Way itself
formed later, because the smaller,
earlier galaxies inhibited the growth
of our larger galaxy.
The observation of these very faint
galaxies has been possible only in the
past decade, thanks to increasingly
sophisticated sky maps from the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the
Dark Energy Survey, which have so far
detected 54 satellite galaxies around
the Milky Way. Alison George ■
DDT was sprayed widely from
the 1940s to kill insects
14 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Adam Mann
MUSCLE fibres and liver tissue are set to be grown on board the International Space Station (ISS). If successful, we could one day see full human organs grown in space.
Researchers have studied the effects of microgravity on different types of cells for decades, but two projects in the pipeline would be the first to attempt to cultivate large volumes of human tissue in space.
The first will grow muscle in a nutrient-rich chamber called a bioreactor in order to assess new drugs for muscle loss. Such loss is part of the natural ageing process, and starts to occur in physically inactive people in their 30s and can worsen over time.
“The degree of muscle loss can be so significant that it creates a risk of frailty and can lead to poor health outcomes,” says Ngan Huang of Stanford University in California. While diet and exercise
can alleviate some of these effects, doctors have long sought drugs to complement such practices.
People who spend extended periods in microgravity also experience muscle loss, which is why astronauts must exercise rigorously while in space. Huang’s team intends to launch the experiment to the ISS next year and assess whether microgravity mimics an accelerated version of muscle loss. If so, the team hopes to test treatments in space.
The second experiment will attempt to grow a 3D structure made from functional liver tissue. Biomedical engineers have produced thin bits of tissue such as cartilage or skin on Earth in the past, but a complex organ like the liver is more challenging.
Part of the problem is that organs inside the body develop in a soft and buoyant environment, whereas artificial scaffolding to
grow organs in the lab tends to be made of hard plastic and cells settle to the bottom of a container under the influence of gravity.
Liver tissue grown in a rotating bioreactor, mimicking the effects of microgravity, has shown some promise. These liver cells are able to metabolise more drugs than those grown in static containers.
But as cell clusters grow, the bioreactors need to spin faster in order to keep them suspended and eventually the cylinder begins turning so quickly that the tissue is pinned against the walls.
Microgravity might more easily mimic the natural environment where organs develop. In the next
few years, Tammy Chang at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues hope to send different stem cells that can give rise to the various tissues and blood vessels of the liver to the ISS. The cells will be filmed as they grow inside a bioreactor and the resulting tissue will be brought back to Earth.
Chang says the eventual goal is to transplant some of the tissue into a rat and see if it functions properly. This could potentially open up a way to produce livers for people on organ donor lists.
“Imagine if we show that we can generate life-saving tissues in orbit, and there’s no other way to do that,” says Chang. It might spur rocket technology to access low Earth orbit more cheaply, she says.
Testing tissue growth in reduced gravity could reveal some unknowns, says bioengineer Jordan Miller of Rice University in Houston, Texas. “If we can validate that microgravity has a positive effect, maybe some of the biochemical pathways activated in a microgravity setting could be identified and those could be directly stimulated here on the ground,” he says. ■
Human tissue to be grown in space
NA
SA
A PSYCHEDELIC drug taken as part
of the South American plant brew
ayahuasca produces effects that
are strikingly similar to near-death
experiences.
Some people who narrowly escape
dying report having had feelings
of leaving the body or of sudden
inner peace. Such phenomena are
described as near-death experiences.
The ayahuasca study suggests these
may be explained by changes in how
the brain works, and aren’t evidence
of paranormal phenomena, say the
researchers behind the finding.
DMT is the main psychoactive
ingredient in ayahuasca, used by
some indigenous peoples in the
Amazon. People who take it often
describe feeling that they transcend
their body and enter another realm.
Chris Timmermann and his
colleagues at Imperial College
London gave DMT intravenously to
13 volunteers and afterwards asked
them to fill in a questionnaire that
assesses near-death experiences.
The same volunteers had previously
been given an intravenous placebo,
and weren’t told which session
involved the real drug.
During the DMT session, all
13 participants met the criteria for
a near-death experience (Frontiers
in Psychology, doi.org/gdz665).
They reported feeling as though they
entered an “unearthly environment”,
feeling “incredible peace” and having
heightened senses and a feeling of
unity with the universe.
There were no statistically
significant differences between the
questionnaire responses of those
who took DMT and 13 people who
had reported actual near-death
experiences.
Little is known about what
happens in the brain when someone
has a near-death experience. The
subjective similarity with taking DMT
suggests that psychedelics could shed
some light on the phenomenon, says
Timmermann. Sam Wong ■
Brew induces near-death experiences
Sunita Williams exercising on
the ISS to prevent muscle loss
“Microgravity might more easily mimic the natural environment where organs develop”
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WHAT IF DINOSAURS
STILL RULED THE EARTH?
WHAT
IF THE
RUSSIANS
GOT TO
THE MOON
FIRST?
WHAT IF TIME STARTED
FLOWING BACKWARDS?
16 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
CRUEL robot overlords get more out of their human subjects than nice ones. The mere presence of an unkind robot seems to improve some cognitive abilities, more so than being watched by a friendly robot or none at all.
The effect of a robot observer on human performance was tested using the Stroop task, in which words printed in different colours appear on a screen and volunteers
must identify the colour, ignoring the word itself. People are usually worse at this when the colour and word clash, like when the word “blue” is printed in green letters.
Nicolas Spatola at the University of Clermont Auvergne in France and his colleagues paired volunteers with a small humanoid robot they could chat to. The robots were programmed to either answer all questions
negatively or all positively, which led to them being seen as mean or friendly. Those who had mean robots were faster at the task and made fewer mistakes than those with friendly ones or no robot (Science Robotics, doi.org/cs3r).
It seems participants give more attention to the “bad” robot. That makes them focus only on the colour of a word, not on reading it. While cruel robots make us better at the Stroop task, they probably won’t work in every situation.
IN BRIEFA
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Slacker ants take a back seat to get the job done faster
TOO many cooks spoil the broth, and the same goes for
ants. A study into how these insects cooperate during a
task has found that the optimum strategy is for most of
them not to do any work. The findings may prove useful
for programming how large swarms of robots cooperate.
Ants create networks of narrow underground tunnels
by excavating soil bit by bit as a team. To understand the
strategies they use, Daniel Goldman at Georgia Tech
and his colleagues placed 30 ants into a transparent
container filled with soil-like particles made of glass.
For 48 hours, ants created tunnels, entering and
exiting them hundreds of times to extend the network.
But surprisingly only 30 per cent of the ants did around
70 per cent of the work. “Only a few… would do the
majority of the work, with the rest just hanging out
trying to avoid clogging up the tunnel,” says Goldman.
To further understand the process, Goldman and his
team tested out different strategies with four excavation
robots. “One dug OK. Two dug OK. Three was kind of
good. But with four, the robots just couldn’t get
anywhere,” he says.
However smart the team made the robots, they kept
causing clogs unless some took a back seat. The results
suggest that when groups of individuals work together,
the best strategy may be for some to hang back, says
Goldman (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aan3891).
Mean robot can help you solve tricky task
Doubts over organ donation shake-up
AN IMPENDING “opt-out” system for organ donation in England may fail to boost transplant rates and could even lead to a fall.
From 2020, people in England will be presumed to consent to donation unless they have signed a register to object. The country currently has an opt-in approach, where people sign up to give consent. Under both systems, families can veto donation.
To gauge the effect of the opt-out system, Magda Osman at Queen Mary University of London and colleagues asked nearly 1300 people to imagine they were a family member being asked to make this decision under different rules.
They found people felt more certain that a relative wanted to donate if they had signed up under the opt-in system, than if they had been presumed to consent under opt-out (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, doi.org/cs3s).
Infected plankton make it cloudier
WHEN clouds cast a shadow over a day out, tiny, sick sea creatures may be partly to blame.
The phytoplankton Emiliania huxleyi (Ehux) is a single cell encased in calcite discs. When infected with a virus known as EhV, it sheds this exoskeleton. Sea spray can fling the discs into the air as an aerosol and water vapour can condense around them to form cloud droplets.
Miri Trainic at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and her team tested the effect of the virus on calcite aerosol release. They found it was 10 times higher for infected Ehux. These discs may contribute more to cloud formation than sea salt because their shape keeps them aloft longer (iScience, doi.org/cs3t).
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 17
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
Honey, I ate the kids again
RAISING kids is hard, even for fish.
Male blennies sometimes eat their
eggs if they think they aren’t worth
the effort and want a better batch.
After female barred-chin
blennies (Rhabdoblennius nitidus)
lay eggs, they leave their male
partners in sole charge of caring
for them until they hatch. This
arrangement usually works well.
But if the female leaves less than
a thousand or so eggs, the male
typically eats them instead of
looking after them.
It was thought this was because
the nutritional value of eating the
eggs outweighed the benefits of
protecting only a few offspring.
But Yukio Matsumoto at Nagasaki
University in Japan and his
colleagues found that the
motivation was actually to enable
them to breed again as soon as
possible to get a larger, healthier
batch of young.
They showed that the breeding
cycle of male R. nitidus, found in
Asia, is tightly controlled by the
presence or absence of eggs.
When eggs are laid in their nests,
testosterone levels in the male
fish drop and they cannot mate –
perhaps to make them stick to
parenting. When the eggs hatch
about a week later, their
testosterone levels rise and
they can court females again
(Current Biology, doi.org/cs3p).
To snap spaghetti in two, add a twist
IT IS a puzzle that has perplexed
physicists for decades: hold a strand
of dry spaghetti at both ends, bend
it until it snaps, and you will always
end up with three or more pieces.
In 2005, researchers in France
finally discovered why: after the
initial break, the brittle spaghetti
flexes back in the opposite direction,
snapping itself again. Yet a lingering
question still hovered over the
culinary conundrum: was it possible,
with the right technique, to snap a
strand of spaghetti into just two?
Mathematicians led by Jörn Dunkel
at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology have concluded you
can, provided you add a twist into
the mix. Using a pair of clamps, they
twisted strands of spaghetti almost
360 degrees before bringing the
two clamps together until the strand
broke. With this method, they could
reliably snap spaghetti in two.
Using a high-speed camera,
they found the twist prevented the
two remnants flexing back quite as
forcefully as an untwisted strand.
The untwisting motion also released
some of the stored energy, further
reducing the likelihood of a second
fracture (PNAS, doi.org/cs3v).
DIETS low in carbohydrates have been linked to reduced longevity unless they are dominated by plant-based foods.
An analysis of data from 15,400 people in the US found that those who lived longest tended to get about 50 to 55 per cent of their energy from carbohydrates. At the age of 50, such people could expect to live a further 33 years.
This is one year longer than people who obtain 70 per cent or more of their energy from carbs, and four years longer than people who get less than 30 per cent of
calories from this food group.Sara Seidelmann at Brigham
and Women’s Hospital in Boston and her colleagues wondered if the types of fat and protein people eat on low-carb diets might contribute to reduced longevity. Diving into the data, they found that when people replaced carbs with meat such as lamb, pork, beef and chicken – typical for low-carb dieters in Europe and the US – their mortality rose.
But the opposite was true for those who ate plant-based sources of fat and protein such as nuts,
legumes and vegetables. The team thinks that the higher mortality of a low-carb, high-meat diet is due to lower intake of vegetables and fruit, as well as the harmful effects of animal proteins and fats on the body’s systems that counter inflammation and oxidative stress, when cells are threatened by a surge in reactive molecules.
For those who eat a lot of carbohydrates, death rates may be higher due to metabolic problems associated with large quantities of refined carbs (The Lancet Public Health, doi. org/cs5h).
Low-carb, high-meat diets could cut years of life
4D printer creates complex ceramics
POTTERY has had a futuristic makeover. It is now possible to 4D print ceramics, which could be used for strong, complex parts in rockets and electronic devices.
4D printing involves making structures that change shape in response to stimuli such as heat, light or elastic forces. This is useful for creating complex objects, but has mostly been limited to flexible materials like metals and plastics.
Now, Jian Lu at City University of Hong Kong and his colleagues have used ceramics, which have the advantage of being extremely strong and able to cope with extreme temperatures.
The researchers developed a ceramic “ink” by mixing ceramic nanoparticles and silicone rubber, which they then used to print stretchy sheets.
To create 4D structures, the researchers stretched the sheets and attached joints in various patterns. Once released, the elastic forces and pattern of joints made the sheets contract and change into bent or helical shapes. Finally, heating at 1000°C caused them to react with air and form hard, rigid ceramics (Science Advances, doi.org/cs5j).
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20 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
THE past century saw rapid growth in life expectancy, a key measure of progress. But no longer.
UK figures released this month show that the life expectancy of people in the country, currently 79 for men and 83 for women, has started to rise more slowly. The change isn’t something to panic about – life expectancy isn’t falling, it’s just not rising as fast as it was. But it will have an impact.
“Potentially, it’s a really big societal, cultural and economic change that we are seeing,” says Nick Stripe at the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), which produced the figures.
Life expectancy is calculated from the proportion of deaths of people at each age. This death rate has been falling in all Western countries for decades, thanks to a raft of improvements in medicine and nutrition. The fall started to slow down in 2011 in the UK.
At first it could have been a statistical fluke, but the latest
mortality figures are now being classed as a real change. They mean that although life expectancy was previously climbing by about three months a year in women and four months a year in men, it is now two weeks and one month a year respectively (see graphs, below).
Similar trends have been seen in other countries, such as the US, Australia and Germany, the ONS reported. However, that doesn’t mean this lower growth in life expectancy will become the norm. Some other countries, such as Japan, Denmark and Italy, have previously seen a slowdown in life expectancy increases, but then reverted to the old, higher rate.
“The trend could reassert itself,” says Stripe. “We do not have enough data yet to say.”
What happens next will have tremendous importance for the future of the UK. So what are the possible explanations for the slowdown?
cause of death because of increased awareness and reduced stigma. But there is also a real rise in this condition. As more people survive heart attacks and cancer, they live long enough to get Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of dementia. This in turn can cause pneumonia: people with dementia often have difficulty swallowing, which leads to food entering the airways, triggering infections.
The rise in dementia cases is likely to persist because, unlike heart disease and cancer, we have no effective therapies for it. “These numbers will continue to rise in the absence of a new treatment,” says Matthew Norton of Alzheimer’s Research UK.
AUSTERITY BITES
Stalling life expectancy isn’t just an issue for older people. Since 2012, the death rates
INSIGHT LIFE EXPECTANCY
The big slowdownGrowth in UK life expectancy is starting to ease off – and no one knows why. Clare Wilson and Andy Coghlan explore the possibilities
In the UK and US, the average annual increase in life expectancy at birth has fallen, although this isn’t the case with all rich nations
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SICK AT HEART
For a long time we have been successfully reducing death rates from heart disease and stroke, but now the knock-on effects are a major factor behind the unexpected backsliding in life expectancy, says the ONS.
Death rates for these conditions plunged by 70 per cent in the past three decades, thanks in part to improvements in heart surgery. Anti-smoking campaigns and the introduction of drugs to lower blood pressure also both prevented heart attacks and stroke. Now many of those who benefited may be starting to die.
One factor could be that the hearts of those saved by surgery eventually give out through heart failure, for which there is no effective treatment. Shifts to unhealthier habits could be another. Although smokers in the UK continue to quit – the biggest help to avoiding heart trouble – gains are now potentially being lost through poor diet and lack of exercise, says Rory Collins at the University of Oxford.
DEADLY DEMENTIA
More than two-thirds of deaths in the UK are in people over the age of 75, so most of the recent slowdown in life expectancy improvements is likely to stem from changes to death rates in this age group.
The most obvious factor is an increasing number of deaths due to dementia. Some of this is down to doctors being more willing to put dementia as the
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25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 21
the decade that followed 1925. For unclear reasons, they have long been experiencing higher rates of improvements in life expectancy than those born before and after.
There were several beneficial changes in the 1920s that could have helped kick this off, such as improved nutrition, better sanitation and the advent of
vaccines for diphtheria and tetanus. But this doesn’t explain why rises in life expectancy slowed for those born later. One theory is that the golden cohort benefited from eating more fruit and vegetables in their childhood and adolescence because food rationing, which began in the second world war and was phased out in the 1950s, restricted access to unhealthier foods.
Whatever the reasons, this group are now in their 80s and 90s and their numbers are falling – so they make less of a contribution to overall death rates. The health advantages of that group are beginning to fade from the overall figures, says Stripe.
HEROIN HIKE
Another possible reason for a slowdown in life expectancy improvements in under-55s could be escalating drug deaths. A National Health Service report published in February revealed that 2593 people died from drug misuse in England and Wales in 2016, 58 per cent more than in 2006 and the highest toll since records began in 1993. Deaths from drug misuse are now the third most common killer in 15 to 49-year-olds, it said.
Increased availability and
among those aged 15 to 55 have also been increasing, mostly through accidents, assault or suicide. Although the number of deaths in this age group is too small to have much impact on headline life expectancy figures, the trend could be a sign of something larger.
One worry is that cuts in social support and healthcare resulting from the UK’s austerity drive, allied to poor job prospects, could lead to “deaths of despair”, like those seen in white, middle-aged Americans. There are parallels with the US, says Stripe, but he thinks the jury’s out on whether austerity is to blame for the slowdown in the UK’s life expectancy. “All we can say is that the data corresponds to an interesting period politically and economically. But correlation is not causation,” he says.
What’s not in doubt is that the UK’s economy is stagnating.
In 2017, its economic growth was the fifth lowest in Europe at just 1.7 per cent. We know that economic collapses elsewhere have shortened lives. The most well known occurred following the fall of the Soviet Union, which saw life expectancy for men plunge from 63.8 to 57.7 between 1990 and 1994.
“Deteriorating health among working-age men is a type of canary in the coal mine for something going deeply wrong with our labour markets,” says David Stuckler at the University of Bocconi in Milan, Italy.
GOLDEN OLDIES
While the slowdown in life expectancy rises is recent, some of the factors responsible may have happened decades ago.
One could be the dwindling of the so-called golden cohort: a group of people who were born in
“Potentially, it’s a really big societal, cultural and economic change that we are seeing”
purity of heroin has been blamed for a doubling in heroin-related deaths between 2012 and 2016, with many of those dying aged 40 or above, according to a report released by Public Health England in September.
“People who became addicted to heroin in their teenage years and 20s back in the 1980s and 1990s are now older, less resilient and therefore more susceptible to overdosing,” says Johnathan Watkins of the PILAR Research Network, a think-tank in Cambridge, UK, that analyses public health issues. Austerity-related cutbacks in support systems for drug users may also have contributed, he says.
OBESITY TIME BOMB
Doctors have long been predicting that today’s children will be some of the first in history to have shorter lives than their parents thanks to the obesity epidemic. But it may be premature to assume that it is behind the recent slowdown in the rate of increase of our life expectancy.
Most of the levelling off stems from changes to death rates in people who are in their 70s or older – where there hasn’t been so much of a rise in obesity in the UK. Changes to death rates in younger age groups are mainly due to other causes.
In fact, it takes fairly severe obesity to have much of an effect on lifespan, and the impact declines as people get older. For instance, people in their 60s and 70s who are classed as obese lose just one extra year of life on average. “Being mildly overweight doesn’t cause a huge difference in mortality figures,” says Steven Grover of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
But David Ludwig of Harvard Medical School predicts that obesity will have more of an effect on life expectancy over the next couple of decades. “The impacts are still flowing through the pipeline,” he says. ■
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
How much time do you have left?
It all depends...
22 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
Maximum impactA “mega” science journal for Africa will be a big boost to research there, says Curtis Abraham
THE wait is nearly over for Africa’s scientists. Very soon, they won’t have to rely on collaboration with Western academics and institutions to get work published in a high-profile journal.
The first edition of Scientific African, the continent’s new “mega” journal backed by a major publisher, is due in September.
It could be a game changer. Lack of access to prominent Western journals represents a catch-22 for many African scientists. Without it, their work can suffer and become less publishable.
A generation ago, sub-Saharan Africa’s share of the world’s scientific papers was 1 per cent, but by 1996 it had dropped to
about 0.7 per cent, where it stayed for almost a decade with no sign of recovery, according to Robert Tijssen at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Scientific African will give a welcome added incentive for research into regional challenges that might not be prominent on a Western agenda: malnutrition, conflict, adaptation to climate change, unproductive agriculture and haemorrhagic disease.
The new journal will, of course,
publish on broader topics. South Africa is co-host of the Square Kilometer Array, an effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope. Robotics engineer Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, a Ghanaian-born NASA scientist who worked on the robotic craft that found water on Mars, has established the Ghana Robotics Academy Foundation.
But the hope is that work that has remained in the shadows will get exposure, aiding African research careers. This could rebalance partnerships. As it stands, collaboration is pretty much skewed towards Western nations, who have largely conceptualised and designed
“ This will give an added incentive for work on challenges not prominent on a Western agenda”
COMMENT
SHOULD we confront population growth as part of efforts to tackle climate change? That question is raised by US environmentalists this week. They argue that population control ought to be seen as a potential “policy lever”.
To their credit, they advocate only voluntary fertility-reducing measures such as education and access to family planning (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aat8680). Unfortunately, history shows that good intentions aren’t enough to prevent abuses, and that voluntary programmes frequently turn into the opposite.
In Bangladesh, hailed by population lobbyists as a success story for voluntary birth control programmes, poorer women were paid to “accept” sterilisation, and the number who accepted soared when unemployment was high. In Peru, 350,000 chiefly Quechuan and Aymaran indigenous
minority women were sterilised against their will in the 1990s.
Such abominations result from treating fertility control not as a human right, but as a means to an end. When birth control policies are motivated by demographic, economic or environmental goals, the focus easily shifts away from supporting women’s right to choose, to pressuring them to make the “right” choice.
That’s especially true in nations divided along ethnic, class and racial lines, and in which those in power see “others” as disposable. These kinds of societies are more likely to use population control in the name of climate change.
In the past, we were told that reducing birth rates in developing countries would end hunger and poverty. It didn’t. Now we are told it will slow climate change, not because poorer people are high carbon dioxide emitters – they
Lives in the balanceMaking population control part of the fight against climate change would be very wrong, says Ian Angus
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 23
projects without much, if any, input from African colleagues.
That could bring us closer to the ideal of local solutions to local challenges, as championed by William Easterly, an economist at New York University. He sees this as a more effective way for poorer nations to achieve prosperity than the grand schemes of the West that, by and large, have failed to deliver socio-economic benefits.
Change won’t come overnight, but Scientific African’s debut will be an important moment, one with an outsize impact. ■
Curtis Abraham is a writer based in Kampala, Uganda
Tom Chivers
DOES weedkiller cause cancer? According to a ruling by a Californian court last week, yes. Monsanto, the agricultural chemicals company, has been ordered to pay $289 million to Dewayne Johnson (pictured), a groundskeeper who says his terminal cancer was caused by their products Roundup and RangerPro, which contain the chemical glyphosate.
The ruling has led to Greenpeace calling for sales of the weedkiller to be restricted and shares in Monsanto’s parent company Bayer to drop. Meanwhile, Thérèse Coffey, an environment minister in the UK government, is under fire for her tacit support of the products, having tweeted that she was about to “deploy the amazing Roundup!”.
But while the jury ruled that Johnson’s cancer, a non-Hodgkin lymphoma, was probably caused by glyphosate, the evidence for a link is extremely thin.
“I don’t think there’s any good scientific evidence,” says Paul Pharoah, who studies cancer epidemiology at the University of Cambridge. We
simply don’t know if glyphosate was a relevant cause of cancer in this case or any other, he says.
In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a branch of the World Health Organization (WHO), said that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic”, having reviewed the evidence.
But Pharoah says this decision is controversial. The IARC found no evidence at all from human studies, and its evidence from animal studies is unconvincing: some studies in rats
and mice found evidence of a raised risk of certain tumours at very high doses, while other studies found no association.
In particular, there was no evidence of a raised risk of the non-Hodgkin lymphoma that Johnson developed. “It’s bizarre,” says Pharoah. “You can’t tell a coherent story.”
The IARC’s finding stands out further because separate reviews of
glyphosate’s safety by the European Food Safety Authority, the European Chemicals Agency and the US Environmental Protection Agency found no increased risk of cancer.
Another review by a different branch of the WHO also found that glyphosate isn’t carcinogenic in rats, although it couldn’t rule out that it might be in mice, in very high doses. Cancer Research UK says there is a “small amount of evidence” that people exposed to very high doses might have increased risk, but no evidence of risk at normal levels.
There is also a problem in that there is no plausible mechanism. Cancer is usually the result of DNA damage, which glyphosate doesn’t cause.
Pharoah adds that the jury’s wariness is understandable. Major corporations have a long and inglorious history of obfuscating evidence that would make their product seem harmful – the manufactured doubt over the links between tobacco and cancer, or fossil fuels and global warming, are obvious examples.
But there is no evidence that has happened here. There have been several independent studies finding no link. It is OK to be cautious about big companies selling chemicals and claiming that they are harmless, but in the specific case of glyphosate, the likelihood of it causing cancer is somewhere between zero and negligible. ■
Glyphosate ruling at odds with evidence
ANALYSIS Cancer risk
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“We simply don’t know if glyphosate was a relevant cause of cancer in this case or any other”
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
aren’t – but because emissions from poorer countries might rise.
Never mind that nations with high birth rates have low per capita emissions or that economic development in those places is controlled by corporate entities, not population. Never mind that most industries in poorer nations produce goods for wealthier ones, that poorer people have no influence over which technologies firms use, get little benefit from polluting industries and are the main victims of global warming.
As the Science authors say, safe, affordable contraception should be available to all, so women can choose whether and when to bear children. But linking birth control to climate change risks eroding women’s right to choose. If rich countries treat women’s rights instrumentally, as a means to achieve environmental ends, they will strengthen repressive elites and deter the poorest people from backing environmental causes.
Climate policies must incorporate the deepest respect for human rights and social justice. Population control campaigns do not qualify. ■
Ian Angus edits online journal Climate
& Capitalism and co-authored Too Many
People? Population, Immigration, and
the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket)
APERTURE
24 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 25
Helping hand
THIS is an indri, the largest of Madagascar’s
endemic lemurs – and it really does need all the
help it can get.
Almost all members of this iconic group of
primates, which range from mouse-sized
animals up to the indri, which is as big as a small
child, are on the brink of extinction. This month,
an assessment for the International Union for
Conservation of Nature said that 95 per cent
of lemur species are at risk, making this the
most threatened mammal group anywhere on
the planet.
The indri is known for its stunningly loud call.
Like other lemurs, it is a victim of hunting and
habitat loss to slash-and-burn agriculture. Its
larger size – it weighs 9 kilograms – makes it a
prime target for hunters and means it requires
a bigger territory to survive.
Conserving it will be a challenge. Because it
has never bred in captivity, preserving it in its
wild habitat is its best hope. Well-managed
protected areas offer the greatest chance of
success, and ecotourism provides vital incomes
in an impoverished nation.
Christoph Schwitzer, a lemur expert at Bristol
Zoological Society in the UK, says there is still
time to save these animals. “I am an unfaltering
optimist and remain hopeful that all 107 lemur
species will survive the current extinction crisis in
Madagascar,” he says. “We haven’t yet lost a single
lemur species in modern times and even though
the rarest one – the northern sportive lemur – is
now down to just 60 individuals in the wild, these
populations can bounce back to larger numbers if
the conditions are right for them.” Jon White
Photographer
Nick Garbutt
naturepl.com
26 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
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The maverick putting ageing in reverse
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 27
HE MADE his name as a pioneer of gene sequencing in the 90s. Since then, however, George Church has
also gained a reputation as something of a maverick, with his often-controversial ideas on how to apply gene editing, most notably his project to bring back the woolly mammoth.
Church is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a prolific entrepreneur. He has also worked for decades to get more people to have their genome sequenced, and with his latest company, he hopes he has hit on a way to do just that.
Why have you set up Nebula Genomics?
It’s not the first time I’ve tried to figure out a way to get affordable genomes to the people of Earth. I’ve tried many models. I think this one is the best as it addresses several issues. One of those is trust, because we’re using secure encryption. The other is price. I used to think there would be some magic price that would trigger everybody to get their genome sequenced. Now I have concluded that even zero is not low enough. We are going to pay people to have it done.
Why do you think people are so resistant to
getting their genome sequenced?
One reason is there’s poor communication of its value by the press, and even by my colleagues. As a result, most people imagine that they are not at risk of having a child with a genetic disease if no one in their family has ever had one. That’s far from the facts. Most infants that are born severely affected are the first in their family history, as far as the parents know.
It’s like seat belts. For years, people wouldn’t install seat belts, and once they were installed, they wouldn’t buckle them, even though it was clearly good for them and does no harm.
The same is true of getting your genome sequenced. It could help prevent a proportion of tragic birth defects, which also cost upwards of $1 million each. You can save the healthcare system trillions of dollars.
So you think everyone should get their
genome sequenced?
I don’t think everyone should do any particular thing other than breathe and eat, but probably yes, it’s good public health. Ninety-five per cent of people will find there was no point in sequencing their genome, but they don’t know that in advance. Imagine you are coming to the end of your life and sitting in the hospital and you say to yourself, why did I bother getting seat belts and airbags? That would be a very weird way to think about seat belts, but it’s not a weird way to think about genetics, apparently.
You are also working on gene editing in sperm.
Why is this important?
If you have a couple that are both unaffected carriers of a genetic condition, they have a high chance of their children being affected very seriously. As an alternative to standard practice right now – which is abortion and IVF – you could edit the sperm to remove the faulty gene. Procreation would then be indistinguishable from the usual, except up front you engineered some of the cells in the testes.
I have been one of the people making sure that this is in the conversation, because the gene-editing conversation has a tendency to go to embryos rather than to sperm. And I think there’s a huge difference, certainly in how acceptable they are to certain groups. For example, in 2004 a Vatican commission imagined a scenario in which editing sperm would be acceptable: it could avoid the unnaturalness of in vitro fertilisation and abortion.
But any gene editing with results that would
be passed on to the next generation faces
regulatory obstacles, right?
The US Congress voted for legislation that prevents the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from evaluating the safety and efficacy of germline gene editing. They didn’t explicitly ban sperm editing, but it’s implicitly banned. I don’t think they thought that through. The people who promoted that aspect of the bill were probably anti-abortion, but ironically that bill is delaying the arrival of technology that would reduce the number of abortions on medical grounds.
Do you have another commercial venture
brewing?
That’s a complicated one: we have 13 start-ups coming out of my lab alone. One of them, Rejuvenate Bio, is working on ageing reversal – in dogs, initially.
Why work on ageing reversal in dogs first?
One of the reasons is we can make the cost much lower. The FDA approval for veterinary products is a lot faster and cheaper, and I want the world to get used to the idea that gene therapies can be inexpensive. Dogs are a really good product target, but they are also a good segue to humans because they are similar in size, they live in our environment, they eat our food, we are responsive to their emotional state. In many ways, they are like children.
We want to do this in dogs that are at least 11 years old. We have tested ageing reversal in mice that are at least 2 years old, mice almost dead with ageing.
What do you really mean by ageing reversal?
Well, there are acute diseases where the recovery is faster in young animals: for example, heart problems in which there is essentially no recovery when you’re old,
but it is very fast when you’re young. So, we are looking at things like how gene therapy can aid recovery from cardiac damage, kidney problems, obesity, diabetes – a lot of things that really only kill old people, only kill dogs that are over 10 years old.
Ageing reversal is a much better target than longevity. It’s very difficult to get the FDA to approve a drug that will make you live 20, 30 years longer. The FDA requires you to prove exactly what you want to put on the label, so if you want to put 30 years of added longevity, you have to do a 30-year study. We’re saying we can achieve ageing reversal in maybe a couple of months, so then our study can be that short.
Do the animals you are treating look the
same afterwards?
The mice look the same. Perhaps a little friskier. ■
Catherine de Lange is New Scientist ’s deputy features editor
“ Sperm editing would result in fewer abortions on medical grounds”
Geneticist George Church tells Catherine de Lange why we should all get our genome sequenced, why sperm editing mustn’t be sidelined and how dogs will lead us to age reversal
INTERVIEW
28 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
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25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 29
OUR minds aren’t passive observers simply observing reality as it is; our minds actually change reality.
The reality we experience tomorrow is partly the product of the mindsets we hold today.” That’s what Alia Crum told global movers and shakers at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It may sound like New Age nonsense, but Crum, who heads the Mind & Body lab at Stanford University in California, can back up her claims with hard evidence showing the mysterious influence the mind has over our health and well-being.
Crum’s pioneering research was inspired by her own experiences as a child gymnast and college ice hockey player. “You can be the same physical being from one day to the next,” she says, “but your mindset can have a dramatic effect on performance and physiological capabilities.” She often wondered why. Then, as a psychology student, she read about the placebo effect and had a eureka moment: if our expectations can influence the effectiveness of a drug, perhaps something similar can happen in other situations, too.
Pursuing that idea, Crum and others have discovered that your mindset affects everything from your weight and fitness to the physical toll of insomnia and stress – even how well you age. The upshot is that two people could have identical genes and lifestyles but one can end up healthier than the other, thanks solely to their different thoughts.
Placebos are inert pills used in most clinical drug trials. The participants are divided randomly into two groups: half take the drug
being tested, the rest, for comparison, take an identical-looking sugar pill. With no active ingredient, the placebo shouldn’t have any effects. Yet it often brings about measurable changes, triggering the release of natural painkillers and lowering blood pressure, for example – all because of people’s expectations. Patients sometimes reap these benefits even when they know they are taking the placebo (see “Everyday placebos”, page 30). On the downside, our expectations of a pill can also produce side effects, including nausea and skin rashes. This is the placebo effect’s “evil” twin, the nocebo effect (see “The science of voodoo”, page 32).
Crum was “blown away” when she learned how powerful these effects can be. “But what surprised me most was the fact that we’ve done relatively little to understand and harness them to improve health and well-being,” she says. Governments spend huge amounts of money encouraging us to adopt healthier lifestyles. What if our efforts could be boosted, or undermined, by the very psychological processes that influence a drug’s efficacy through the placebo and nocebo effects, Crum wondered. She has spent the past decade investigating that possibility.
One of Crum’s first experiments examined the fitness of 84 hotel cleaners. She suspected that few of them would be aware of the sheer amount of exercise their job entails, and that this might prevent them from gaining the full benefits of that workout. To manipulate their mindsets, she gave half of them detailed information about the physical demands of
Simply changing your attitude could make you itter, slimmer, less stressed and even younger, inds David Robson
>
COVER STORY
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30 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
their work – such as the fact that hoovering burns 200 calories an hour – and told them that their activity met the US surgeon general’s exercise recommendations.
One month later, despite reporting no change to their diet or activity outside work, the cleaners who received the information had lost about a kilogram each, and their average blood pressure had dropped from elevated to normal. The others showed no difference. It was, admittedly, a small study and Crum didn’t record actual behaviour. “It could be that they were putting slightly more oomph into making the beds,” she says.
However, a follow-up study with her colleague, Octavia Zahrt, bolstered the idea that people’s expectations directly influence their body’s response to exercise. That study used data from health surveys monitoring more than 60,000 people for up to 21 years. Zahrt found that the “perceived fitness” of the participants – how they felt compared with the average person – was a better predictor of their risk of mortality than the amount of time they said they spent exercising. Crucially, some of them wore accelerometers for part of the survey period – yet, after taking their actual physicial activity into account, the influence of their perceived fitness remained. Overall, people who took a more pessimistic view of their fitness were up to 71 per cent more likely to die during the survey, compared with those who thought they were more active than average – whatever their exercise routine.
How this works is still a bit of a mystery. We do know that the brain can directly control blood pressure through the autonomic nervous system. In addition, Crum suspects that a poor perception of your fitness could be triggering inflammation and the release of hormones such as cortisol, which might help determine how the body responds to exercise. Her team is investigating possible mechanisms but, she says, it’s not too early to take advantage of these effects. Crum’s advice, which she follows herself, is not to deceive yourself about your fitness, but to make sure that you don’t undervalue the exercise you do either. You should also avoid comparing yourself critically with your peers, particularly if they are exceptionally sporty.
Fabrizio Benedetti at the University of Turin Medical School, Italy, who has pioneered work on the placebo and nocebo effects, praises the findings. “Crum’s work is very interesting and her approach to health is important from both a medical and psychological point of view,” says Benedetti. He stresses the need for caution, given the many variables that
EVERYDAY PLACEBOS
CAFFEINE: If a strong espresso sets
your nerves jangling, that may be
largely due to your expectations.
Even pure water increased alertness
and raised blood pressure in
volunteers who were told it contained
caffeine. As for those withdrawal
symptoms when you can’t get your
morning cup of joe, they might be all
in your head, too.
SPORTS SUPPLEMENTS: There is
little scientific backing for many of
these products, but studies show
that people only have to believe they
are taking performance enhancers
or energy drinks to show greater
stamina and strength. Even the
effects of steroids may be boosted
by a placebo response.
DESIGNER BRANDS: Are they really
better than generics? Not necessarily.
People tricked into thinking they were
wearing designer sunglasses could
more easily decipher small writing
through the glare of bright light than
those who thought they were wearing
less prestigious brands.
BOOZE: Drinking culture is full of
urban myths, including the idea that
adding Red Bull to vodka “gives you
wings”. Studies reveal that the power
of expectation is what really increases
feelings of drunkenness.
LUCKY CHARMS: They work
because we believe they will.
Golfers who thought they were using
a professional’s putter perceived the
hole to be larger and easier to putt
– and were more accurate as a result.
influence everyday fitness, but argues that “we can learn a lot about the mechanisms, implications and applications” of the mind-body connection from such studies.
Crum has now documented many other ways in which our mindset could be harming our health. A nocebo effect may undermine efforts to lose weight by dieting, for instance. In 2011, Crum offered volunteers a milkshake at her lab, then measured their levels of the “hunger hormone” ghrelin, which normally drops after a meal. Although everyone received the same shake, some were told it was healthy while others were led to believe
they were having an indulgent treat. The impact was striking. Those who thought they had drunk a low-calorie shake showed markedly higher levels of ghrelin afterwards, which left them feeling less full.
Ghrelin doesn’t affect appetite alone. By signalling food deprivation, the hormone also slows down metabolism, tipping the body towards storing fat rather than burning it. It makes evolutionary sense to reduce energy consumption when resources are scarce, but it is bad news when we are trying to lose weight. “When people think they are eating healthily, that’s associated with the sense of
“ Understanding that stress needn’t be damaging can help your body cope with it”
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 31
deprivation,” says Crum. “And that mindset matters in shaping our physiological response.” Instead, she suggests, dieters should cultivate a “mindset of indulgence”, savouring the textures and flavours of whatever they are eating.
Non-dieters could be falling prey to this effect, too. When we drink a sugary beverage, our brain doesn’t seem to recognise the liquid as a source of energy, and fails to adjust digestion accordingly so that we tend to eat more afterwards than if we had eaten solid food containing the same number of calories. However, it is possible to subvert this effect by changing our expectations. Richard Mattes at Purdue University in Indiana primed people to believe that an energy drink would solidify once it reached their stomach. As well as lowering ghrelin levels, this increased their insulin response after consumption, and the drink stayed in their stomach longer – all of which left them feeling fuller. “That was followed by a decrease in the daily energy they consumed,” says Mattes.
Crum has also been investigating the influence of our expectations on stress. It is well known that chronic stress can lead to reduced cognitive performance, high blood pressure and a compromised immune system. But can the fear of stress itself worsen its harmful effects? To find out, Crum first
assessed students’ attitudes by getting them to rate statements such as “experiencing stress depletes my health and vitality” and “experiencing stress enhances my performance and productivity”. Then she told them that they had to give a short presentation. Faced with this prospect, those who considered stress to be debilitating rather than enhancing showed the largest physiological reactions, including greater fluctuations in levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
Such reactions are thought to underpin the most damaging health effects of stress. However, moderate stress responses can
actually improve health, triggering the production of hormones necessary for cell growth, among other things. “There’s a lot of public health messaging that warns us about the effects of stress, but it’s one-sided, and builds the mindset that stress is debilitating, when in fact there are many enhancing qualities,” says Crum. What’s more, simply understanding that stress needn’t be damaging can help our bodies cope with it. After watching a video on the ways that stress can boost focus and creativity, Crum’s participants showed more optimal hormonal responses under stress, marked by moderate levels of cortisol and raised levels of growth-promoting hormones.
Tired all the time?
The dangers of stressing about stress might help explain some insomnia too. About a quarter of people’s perceptions of how well they sleep don’t correlate with the sleep they actually get, with potentially significant repercussions. “Complaining good sleepers” – people who believe they are insomniacs, even though monitoring of their night-time brain activity suggests otherwise – are most likely to experience symptoms such as daytime fatigue, high blood pressure, depression and anxiety. “Non-complaining bad sleepers”, by contrast, are remarkably free of ill effects. “Worry about poor sleep is a stronger pathogen than poor sleep,” says Kenneth Lichstein at the University of Alabama, who made this discovery.
It is possible that constant daytime fatigue leads people to identify as insomniac, rather than insomnia causing the fatigue. But, at least one study supports the idea that a placebo effect is partly responsible. It found that simply priming participants to think they had slept poorly or unusually deeply influenced their cognitive functioning the next day.
All these findings give us plenty of reasons to reassess our mindsets. But perhaps the most provocative research concerns ageing – with some strong evidence that negative beliefs could knock decades off your life.
The first clues emerged in the early 1980s. Ellen Langer at Harvard University – who later collaborated with Crum on the hotel cleaner study – took a group of pensioners to a monastery in New Hampshire and told them to act as if they were 22 years younger for the duration of their stay. The retreat was decorated as if the year were 1959, and filled with music, films, magazines and books from that era. Their rooms contained no mirrors,
You don’t need to go
to the gym to get the
benefits of a workout
>
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only pictures of their younger selves. After just five days, the pensioners’ arthritis had improved, their posture was more upright, and their thinking – as measured by an IQ test – was sharper.
Inspired by this study, other teams have since shown that our attitudes really can influence how our bodies fare over time. Overall, people who view ageing positively live 7.5 years longer than those who associate it with frailty and senility. Negative perceptions of ageing are not merely the result of poor health; they can foreshadow symptoms by as much as 38 years.
Admittedly, people with a pessimistic view of ageing are less active and less likely to seek healthcare when they need it. However, many studies find this cannot fully explain the effect on health. So, what’s going on?
It seems that people with rosier beliefs about ageing react less to stress and are less likely to develop inflammation – both of which would mean that they age more slowly. Becca Levy at the Yale School of Public Health has found that they tend to have longer telomeres – the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes. This matters because telomeres wear away with time, so are a yardstick of age. Such people are also less likely to develop brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease than those who view ageing negatively.
Ageism is deeply engrained. “We know that children as young as 3 or 4 have already
assimilated the age stereotypes of their culture,” says Levy. But her latest studies suggest that attitudes can be changed. In one, participants aged between 61 and 99 played a computer game while positive age-related words such as “wise”, “mature” and “experienced” flashed briefly on the screen. Although they did not consciously register the words, their perceptions of ageing had significantly improved after four sessions, as had their physical well-being. Amazingly, the benefits, including increased mobility, surpassed those from a six-month physical exercise regime.
No wonder some researchers are calling for campaigns that educate people about the dangers of ageism. “Being aware of these
stereotypes, and questioning them, and developing a resistance to them – that’s a good skill people can learn at any age,” says Levy.
Of course, a positive mindset is not a panacea. But these findings could help us all benefit more from our efforts to achieve a healthy lifestyle through exercise, a balanced diet, relaxation and getting a good night’s sleep. “It’s about being mindful of the fact that we have mindsets and that they matter, and being empowered by the possibility that we can choose more useful mindsets,” says Crum. ■
David Robson is a freelance journalist in London
A positive attitude to ageing will keep you
healthier and more active for longer
DA
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“ It’s about being empowered by the possibility that we can choose better mindsets”
THE SCIENCE OF VOODOO
When anthropologists first heard
reports of witch doctors killing
people with a curse, they looked for
rational explanations. These were
undermined, however, by the
discovery that Western doctors have
similar powers. In the 1970s, for
example, a man died just months after
doctors told him he had end-stage
liver cancer – despite the autopsy
revealing that the diagnosis had been
mistaken. He hadn’t died from cancer
but from believing he had cancer.
We now know what lies behind
these strange goings-on: the nocebo
effect. The “evil” twin of the placebo
effect, it is when putting someone in
a negative frame of mind has adverse
consequences for their health or
well-being. Tell people that a medical
procedure will be extremely painful,
for example, and they will experience
more pain than they would otherwise.
Similarly, warning about the possible
side effects of a drug makes it more
likely that patients will report
experiencing those effects.
The nocebo effect is widespread:
about a quarter of participants in
clinical trials experience side effects
even though they have been given a
placebo, a sugar pill. Recent research
indicates that it can be even stronger
than the placebo effect, particularly
when people are anxious or feel that
their doctor doesn’t understand or
believe them. And the nocebo effect
is not just a problem in healthcare.
It could also be undermining your
efforts to lose weight, shape up,
cope with stress, and more
(see main story).
B O O K Y O U R T I C K E T S N O W
newscientistlive.com
The world’s most exciting festival of ideas and discovery
MAINSTAGE SPONSOR
20 – 23 Sept 2018 | ExCeL London
AT THE HEART OF SPORTTechnology has changed the way we watch sport
on our screens. Yet there are some things we still
can’t do. “Nobody has ever seen the true colour of
Manchester United’s football shirt on television,”
reveals Jamie Hindhaugh, chief operating officer
of BT Sport. The reason is that TV broadcasts a far
narrower range of colours than the human eye can
see. So screens essentially fudge many colours,
especially deep reds.
Bringing the colour of players’ football shirts to
life is one of the many ways that BT Sport strives to
get viewers to the heart of the action. It’s a mantra
that drives Hindhaugh, who launched BT Sport
just five years ago. In that time, the company has
become the first to broadcast live sporting action
in 4K ultra-high definition giving fans more detail.
It was the first to bring the roar of the stadium into
the home using 3D surround sound. And it aired the
2016 Champions League’s football final in both HDR
for more realistic colour and in virtual reality for an
immersive experience.
These firsts came about by BT asking what
it could bring to sport with its fibre and mobile
networks. Yet technology for the sake of it
isn’t a good thing. Despite critical acclaim, the
Champions League final convinced Hindhaugh that
VR headsets were the wrong approach. Fans enjoy
sharing the highs and lows of a game with each
other and goggles get in the way. “It’s very much
why 3D failed in sport,” he says.
BT Sport still shoots in 360 degrees and lets VR
viewers choose their own “magic window” onto the
action based on the orientation of their phone or
tablet. Soon fans will be able to personalise the
commentary and graphics as well. You’ll also be able
to watch a match on your phone with friends across
the UK while you group chat, without any signal
delays.
You can hear how technology is changing sport
for viewers, players and athletes at New Scientist
Live on Friday 21 September. Presenter Clare
Balding will be hosting a discussion with Jamie
Hindhaugh, rugby star Lawrence Dallaglio,
wheelchair racer Hannah Cockroft and sports
engineer Steve Haake.
A D V E R T O R I A L
34 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
HE WAS the janitor who unlocked the secret of how ice ages happen. The sickly son of a poor Scottish farmer, James
Croll left school at 13 and became an itinerant labourer and failed salesman. But decades of private reading and an astonishing capacity for original thought saw him soar to scientific stardom. Croll became the father of climate-change research, and corresponded as an equal with the science heavyweights of the day, including Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen and geologist Charles Lyell. Yet you have probably never heard of him.
His star waned, and his insights about the cosmological causes of the great glaciations sank from view, until revived half a century later by Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch, who took the plaudits. Croll died in penury, a footnote even on his own gravestone. Was he a victim of Victorian snobbishness? Or might he have fared even worse had he lived in the modern age?
Croll was born in 1821 and raised on a smallholding on moorland in rural east Scotland, land he worked from a young age. His sporadic schooling ended at 13, but by then he had stumbled across a copy of The Penny Magazine, the New Scientist of its day. He became hooked on science. By 14, he was reading the great science texts of the time. “At first I became bewildered, but soon the beauty and simplicity of the conceptions filled me with delight and astonishment,” he later wrote in an autobiographical sketch. “I studied pneumatics, hydrostatics, light, heat, electricity and magnetism. I obtained assistance from no one.”
His head was full of ideas, but Croll had no qualifications and no money. At 16, he was a travelling millwright, sleeping in rat-infested barns. Later he became a joiner, before a damaged elbow left him unable to do manual work. He was also, as his step-nephew James Campbell Irons wrote in a biographical appreciation, “heavy and ungainly” as well as “modest, shy, dry and with an almost speechless manner”.
Not surprisingly, then, Croll also failed as a tea merchant and an insurance salesman, and went bankrupt as the landlord of a temperance hotel in a town of 3500 people and 16 taverns. By luck, he eventually found himself a
neighbour of the head of Anderson’s University, the forerunner of Strathclyde University. Croll became its caretaker. There, duties done, he would hole up in the library, pursuing the great scientific issues of the day. One of those was the cause of the ice ages.
Geologists had deduced that large parts of Europe had been repeatedly covered in ice, but nobody knew what caused this waxing and waning. There were some theories rooted in astronomical phenomena, but it was Croll’s untutored, free-ranging mind that would crack the conundrum.
By painstaking calculation, he showed that over more than a million years, the glaciations appeared to coincide with the periodic extremes of what astronomers call eccentricity. This variation in the elliptical shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun has only a tiny effect on the total amount of solar radiation reaching the planet. In his greatest insight, Croll proposed that it was enough to trigger substantial indirect cooling of the Arctic – in particular by the diversion of the Gulf Stream, reducing heat reaching the pole. As more ice formed, more sunlight was reflected, causing more cooling. Such amplifying feedbacks underpin estimates of the impact of human-made climate change today.
His ideas were published in 1864 in the Philosophical Magazine, a top UK science journal of the day. The paper was attributed to “James Croll, Anderson’s University”. Whether the editors knew Croll was a janitor is not recorded, but soon it didn’t matter. As Croll put it, “the paper excited a considerable amount of attention”.
Ice sageIt took a singular Scot, the unschooled James Croll, to explain Earth’s recurrent cold spells, inds Fred Pearce
A genius who worked out the choreography of
glaciers, James Croll was not a people person
UNTOLD STORY
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25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 35
He was soon corresponding with the great and the good of science. Darwin wrote: “I have never, I think, in my life, been so deeply interested by any geological discussion.” Croll’s paper had, he said, “cleared so much mist from before my eyes”.
In 1867, Croll became secretary of the Scottish Geological Survey in Edinburgh. It allowed him time, despite growing bouts of poor health, to produce a book on his thinking. Published in 1875, Climate and Time appeared to seal his reputation as one of the era’s great scientists. Within months, he had an honorary degree from the University of St Andrews, and fellowships at the Royal Society in London and the New York Academy of Sciences.
Croll published more groundbreaking research: on how glaciers moved, the causes of ocean circulation, and the thickness of Antarctic ice – at a time when scarcely anyone had even set foot on the continent. He also persuaded Darwin that rivers were important agents of erosion.
The high waters of Croll’s fame retreated as he became ever more reclusive. Turning down an invitation to lecture at the British Association (today the British Science Association), he wrote: “I dislike all such public displays… there is a cold materialistic
atmosphere around scientific men in general that I don’t like. I mix but little with them.”
His health worsening, he retired in 1880, aged 59. Prime ministers William Gladstone and Lord Salisbury both rebuffed pleas from Darwin, Lord Kelvin and others to give Croll a full civil-service pension. He ended up penurious in rented lodgings in Perth, just streets away from where he bought his first Penny Magazine. He died a decade later. He was buried in what is now an abandoned churchyard in Cargill. A worn gravestone
lists 14 of his forebears, with Croll and his wife Isabella mentioned last, in the smallest letters, as space on the stone ran out.
One obituary called him “among the foremost, if not the first [investigator] of the physical cause of climatic change”. But by then, the salons of science had tired of this testy recluse. Soon, his name and his theories were largely forgotten.
Only in the 1930s were they revived by Milankovitch, who corrected some
inaccuracies in what he called Croll’s “most remarkable” work. Even so, when ocean-sediment cores taken in the 1970s confirmed the causal links deduced by Croll, the Scot was so forgotten that Earth’s periodic coolings became known as Milankovitch cycles.
In the past decade, a handful of Scottish academics have tried to rescue Croll’s name. There is now a memorial to him outside the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in Perth.
Croll’s fall is usually painted as the result of Victorian sniffiness at the untutored working class. Maybe so. But what is remarkable, says Andrew Dlugolecki at the University of East Anglia, UK, is how much respect he did receive in his heyday, despite his lack of formal qualifications. “Leading scientists corresponded with Croll as an equal. That would probably be impossible nowadays, given the huge emphasis placed on papers in the scientific literature,” says Dlugolecki.
And what journal today would publish a paper, whatever its merits, from a janitor with no formal education? New Scientist asked Nature whether its editors could think of such an upstart in their recent archives. They could not. ■
Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist
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“ An astonishing capacity for original thought saw him soar to scientific stardom”
36 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
WHEN Marco Polo visited Kublai Khan at the end of the 13th century, little seems to have impressed him more
than that the Khan used paper money. “In this city of Kanbalu is the mint of the Great Khan, who may truly be said to possess the secret of alchemists, as he has the art of producing money,” he wrote.
It isn’t hard to see why it seemed that way. To a European of the time, money consisted of things such as silver and gold coins that had intrinsic, tradable worth. The Khan simply took common old bark from mulberry trees, pulped it into paper and, with an array of signatures and seals, declared that it had value. No one in the Mongol empire dared refuse it as a means of payment.
Today this idea is so central to our lives that we hardly spare it a thought. But cash – physical money in the form of notes or coins – is losing its lustre. The rise of internet shopping and the increasing convenience of card payments, plus the extra costs for governments and central banks associated with cash, means all the talk is of taking money fully digital.
The necessary technology already exists. But as the dash away from cash gathers
momentum, there are increasing rumblings about the downsides. Digital money might not solve all the problems of cash, and will bring a whole slew of new ones too. So do we want it?
Victoria Cleland knows a thing or two about cash. Currently the Bank of England’s executive director for banking, payments and financial resilience, she was until recently its chief cashier, meaning her signature appeared on all banknotes issued in England. Cash fulfils three crucial functions in modern
Goodbye, cash?Banks and governments are toying with killing o� physical money.
That might not be such a good idea, says Joshua Howgego
>
system including central banks has built up around it (see “The rise of the bank”, page 38).
But the use of cash is in free fall. According to trade association UK Finance, fewer payments will be made with cash than by debit card in the UK for the first time in 2018. The proportion of cash payments in the UK dropped from 62 per cent of transactions in 2006 to 40 per cent in 2016, and is projected to fall to just 21 per cent in 2026 (see “Money down the drain”, page 38). It is a similar story of “demonetisation” around the world, as cards and mobile payment apps take over the functions of cash.
That change has largely been driven by consumer convenience, but governments and central banks have their own reasons to think beyond cash. Coins and notes must be minted or printed – and in far greater quantities than are in use at any one time, to keep shops, retail banks and cash machines in stock. That leads to a paradox of cash. “We are seeing a slowdown in cash used for transactions, but we are still seeing an increase in demand for cash,” says Cleland.
Part of the problem is rock-bottom interest rates, and the fear of bank runs generated by the financial crisis a decade ago, which have
SOURCE: SWEDISH RIKSBANK
OF PAYMENTS IN SWEDEN ARE ALREADY CASHLESS
87%
economies, she says. It is easily exchangeable from person to person; everyone knows precisely what it is worth; and in normal economic circumstances, its value barely changes from day to day.
There are plenty of other tradable assets around, from gold bullion to diamonds to houses, but none fulfils all these functions as neatly as cash does. A whole complex financial
28 August 2018 | NewScientist | 37
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led many people to opt for stashing cash under the mattress. A survey commissioned by the Bank of England in 2014 found that 18 per cent of people in the UK hoarded cash, an average of £345 each.
Beyond that, though, there is a steady flow of cash across borders and into criminal enterprise and the untaxed shadow economy. Economists Friedrich Schneider and Colin Williams have estimated that the shadow economy accounts for between 8 and 24 per cent of GDP in the rich-world OECD countries, representing a serious drain on government coffers.
Money down the drainIn the UK, as in many parts of the world, the use of cash is falling precipitously
Nu
mb
er
of
pa
ym
en
ts (
bill
ion
s)
Cash
Standing order
Faster payments and other remote banking
Cheque
Bacs direct credit
Direct debit
Debit card
PROJECTED
Credit/charge/purchasing card
2006 2011 2016 2021 2026SOURCE: UK FINANCE
25
20
15
10
5
0
allows people to sidestep this stick.Oddly enough, it is a movement originally
designed to topple conventional finance that has spurred talk of government-issued digital money. Digital cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin were motivated by a desire to escape the whole banking system and its centralised accounting and control. Instead, they use a distributed, supposedly unfalsifiable online ledger known as the blockchain, which relies on rigid mathematical rules to securely record transactions in the currency. This generates the same kind of trust in a transaction that cash issued and backed by a central bank does.
Now central banks are considering how they might co-opt such a system for their own purposes. One of the furthest along the road is the Swedish Riksbank, which floated the idea of a state-issued digital currency, e-krona, in 2016. Despite negative interest rates, cash use is falling unusually rapidly in Sweden: the proportion of cash payments declined from 39 per cent in 2010 to 13 per cent in 2018. About 60 per cent of Swedes already use a mobile app called Swish that allows people to instantly transfer money between different bank accounts just by tapping in a phone number.
This is really just a user-friendly interface with the Swedish banking system’s existing payment infrastructure. E-krona would be a whole new currency. In a report issued in late 2017, the Riksbank identified two possible ways of doing things. The first would be to provide bank accounts at the central bank in which people could keep digital currency, then have a centralised register of transactions between them, not unlike the databases already used to process debit card transactions.
The second would be a system by which encrypted digital files are exchanged between users, where the files themselves are declared to have value. “Other Swedish authorities are very interested,” says Björn Segendorf, a policy analyst at the Riksbank, seeing a way also to reach people without bank accounts. “It seems one of their main headaches is making payments to unbanked people, and this might offer a solution.” The bank asked for proposals from tech companies for how to build the e-krona and, having received 33 ideas, is continuing to discuss the options this year.
Sweden isn’t alone. In November 2017, Uruguay published details of a small test of digital pesos issued by the country’s central bank. Venezuela has launched the petro,
SOURCE: CENTRAL BANK OF KENYA
OF GDP IN KENYA IS TRANSACTED THROUGH
MOBILE DIGITAL PAYMENTS
49%
Modern finance began with institutions
such as the London goldsmith bankers of
the 17th century, who accepted chunks
of gold, recorded its value in ledgers and
issued a receipt or IOU.
Gradually people began to pay each
other for goods by exchanging these
notes. But holders could only redeem the
gold at the bank that issued it, and had
to physically move the gold to their own
bank to realise its value. So banks came
to accept each other’s notes, and to take
care of moving the gold around.
As the number of banks and the
complexity of transactions increased,
it became hard to keep track of where
the gold should be. The solution was for
a “clearing bank” to sit at the centre of
the system and keep a single,
trustworthy register of transactions.
That clearing role is carried out by
central banks like the Bank of England
or the US Federal Reserve, which
now issue the standard IOUs everyone
uses, and generally ensure that no
one attempts to spend the same money
twice. By controlling the supply of
money, and twiddling associated knobs
such as the base interest rate, central
banks have become central to a
well-greased economy.
THE RISE OF THE BANK
Ending cash would help combat crime, while also giving central banks more power to keep the economy moving, for example by introducing negative interest rates. This de facto tax on money in banks is already in effect in Japan, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland, and Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane has called it an “interesting solution”. The idea is to encourage people to spend money when the economy is stagnating. Hoarding cash
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 39
that sits in your bank account, or that you use when you pay with plastic. “When you’re using a credit or debit card, you are using money that’s created by a commercial bank,” says Garrick Hileman at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance in the UK.
This money is either created by interest on loans made by that institution, or by you when you make a deposit. Unlike with central-bank cash, there is no hard-and-fast guarantee that you will get this money back. Commercial
banks work on the assumption that not everyone will withdraw their money at once. If this happens, it can run out, as for example happened with the collapsed UK bank Northern Rock in 2008.
The fear is that digital currencies could make this sort of thing more likely. In times of crisis, people would pull their money from commercial banks and buy safe digital currency backed by a central bank – a potentially quicker way to undermine the banking system than withdrawing your money in the form of physical cash. As the Bank of England’s Marilyne Tolle suggested in a paper in 2016, that could precipitate chaos: if commercial banks went out of business, there would be no one to provide loans.
>
a cryptocurrency run by the state, although the scheme is widely derided. South Korea, too, plans to be cashless by 2020 and has been mulling launching a digital currency.
But the latest signs are that it will not, at least for now. One concern cited by the country’s central bank is how it would radically transform the banking system, potentially destabilising it. The reason is the subtle difference between cash backed by a central bank and the non-physical money
SOURCE: ING INTERNATIONAL SURVEY MOBILE BANKING 2017
OF PEOPLE IN THE US SAY THEY CARRY CASH
RARELY OR NEVER
34%
There may be ways around that, such as allowing commercial banks to offer better interest rates than central banks. But this is uncharted territory, and the Bank of England’s researchers are still trying to work out what the effects might be. “This is the big reason why the Bank has backed away from issuing a central bank digital currency to everyday people,” says Hileman. Cleland confirms that, although the Bank is monitoring the situation, it has no immediate plans to introduce a digital currency. It is, however, testing whether the technology that underlies it could be used to speed up international financial transactions (see “Really swift”, page 40).
There are other reasons for scepticism about digital money, too. While a cashless economy might stop people stuffing cash under mattresses, hoarding hard currency isn’t in itself morally wrong, and stopping it undermines honest people’s right to choose what they do with their money. Critics suggest that criminals would simply switch to another cash currency, or a tradable asset such as gold.
Brett Scott, author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance, has written about the time he was due to speak at a conference on reinventing money, and went to get a drink from a card-only vending machine only to have his plastic denied. His point is that cash transactions take place between two parties, whereas digital transactions inevitably involve third-party payment facilitators. Currently
40 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
these are private credit and debit card firms such as Visa and Mastercard. Not only do those firms make a profit on the back of your payments, they can also choose not to offer their services to certain clients.
If we were to totally replace physical cash with digital cash, we would be giving a similar power to a state authority or any other third party they might franchise the operation out to. And whoever controls your digital currency potentially has access to a huge amount of information about you, your finances and your habits.
Questionable transactions
That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, says Tom Blomfield, founder of Monzo, a recently founded mobile-only bank in the UK. Monzo already crunches data to offer its customers insights into their spending habits, for example automatically labelling payments made on one of the bank’s debit cards “groceries” or “eating out” and flashing them up on the customer’s phone.
He says there are about 30 financial issues, from switching energy providers to renewing insurance policies, where such a data-driven approach could help – with the proviso that people are clear what they are getting into when they sign up. “I don’t want to use the
Phasing out large-value banknotes
could make criminal activity harder
F-word – Facebook,” says Blomfield. “But they didn’t do enough proactive stuff.”
Others are less sanguine. If one driver of the end of cash is a desire to control the flow of money more and reduce questionable transactions, that implies a degree of insight into the nature of transactions. Even with the best of intentions and safeguards in place,
the question is whether having a lot more sensitive data sloshing around in the digital realm can ever be a good thing. “There has been a lot said about the decline of cash, but there’s not been nearly as much discussion of the data privacy and what it would mean, potentially, to go to a world of completely known transactions where there’s no anonymity, no privacy,” says Hileman. Then there are questions of infrastructure reliability. “Imagine a completely electronic payment system, no cash. Imagine there’s a cyberattack and people can’t transact. That would be catastrophic, there would be chaos in the streets.”
Such problems exist to be solved – but mean that we probably shouldn’t anticipate the end of cash soon. Even critics baulk at that suggestion. Kenneth Rogoff is a Harvard economist who wrote the 2016 book The Curse of Cash, which among other things strongly argues that cash oils the wheels of the criminal underworld. “I don’t make the case for going cashless,” says Rogoff. There is inestimable value in being able to use cash in certain situations, including emergencies.
Instead, he suggests phasing out only the most valuable banknotes, the £50 note in the UK, say, or the US $100 bill. Perhaps that’s what the immediate future looks like – not cashless, just less cash. ■
Joshua Howgego is a feature editor at New Scientist
“ Whoever controls your digital currency has access to a huge amount of information about you”
GP
KID
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TY
International money transfers
are a pain. Say someone in
London wants to send money
to someone in Singapore.
Unlike within a country,
there is no central money-
issuing authority to ensure
that all the funds are there
and can be used.
The UK bank must first
send digital messages to the
bank in Singapore, instructing
it that the transfer is going to
happen using a system set up
by the Belgium-based Society
for Worldwide Interbank
Financial Telecommunication,
or SWIFT. Generally it is
anything but, taking at least
three days to go through,
because the first bank has
no guarantee that the second
bank will accept the transfer,
or of how much it will cost.
To pay the money in
Singapore dollars, the
recipient bank must take
this from a holding place
known as a nostro account.
Not just any bank can afford
to maintain a well-stocked
nostro account, so not just
any bank can take care of
international transfers. Even
so, there is about $5 trillion
sitting in these accounts
worldwide, which could be
put to better use.
Shared ledger technology
of the sort cryptocurrencies
use could be the answer. In
2017, the Bank of England set
up an experiment in which
money was transferred
between two simulated
accounts in different
countries using the
Interledger Protocol, an open
source shared ledger system
invented by a firm named
Ripple. Instead of three days,
the necessary checks and
payments happened in
seconds. “We’re really excited
about this,” says Ripple’s
Marcus Treacher, adding that
he is talking to other central
banks, too. “None is using the
technology for real yet, but
we believe it’s very close.”
Treacher thinks payments
systems are in an era akin
to how business was
pre-internet: connect things
up and it opens up new
opportunities.
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Andrew Spira Jeremy Webb
42 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
Sea Creatures, at the RHS Lawrence Hall, London, to 30 August; then to Edinburgh, Harrogate and Belfast
THE 3-tonne corpse of Hai Hai the baby minke whale, beached on a Chinese island in 2009, was rotting by the time scientists reached it. Undeterred, a team of around 30 anatomists swung into action, labouring for nearly two years to preserve, dehydrate and plastinate it, before reassembling it to reveal muscles on one side, and bones, nerves and organs on the other.
Now Hai Hai, the world’s largest plastinated marine animal, is the star of Sea Creatures, an exhibition of more than 50 similarly preserved aquatic animals that will be touring the UK over the next few months. His companions include sharks, a manta ray, a porpoise and a giant squid. Ocean dwellers ranging from crabs to cuttlefish are also represented, as well as some 150 individual body parts.
Any fish market serves up a visual banquet of aquatic viscera – fresh from the sea, to boot. But when the sea’s charismatic megafauna are presented for our delectation, we seek assurances that they are being served up with respect, and not merely to sate our more ghoulish appetites – a concern that has lingered over plastination spectaculars for decades, largely thanks to the exhibitions of human cadavers staged by the technique’s inventor, Gunther von Hagens. Educational value is the usual fig leaf held up against charges of indecency.
Sea Creatures, presented by a former associate of von Hagens, stresses that its exhibits
have been “ethically sourced” – although Hai Hai is the only specimen whose provenance is described.
The curation is generally sound, with sections devoted to the flamboyant (a staring sailfish) and the humble (a cabinet of shellfish). There are idiosyncrasies: a salami-sliced
penguin is a non sequitur in an area otherwise devoted to invertebrates. And the show’s few wince-worthy grotesques seem inadvertent, rather than designed: another penguin grinning
manically as it opens its skin; a porpoise split like a banana.
Credibility comes from a partnership with the Scottish Association for Marine Science, which has provided crisply informative labels describing the anatomies and behaviours of the animals on display.
The presentation of body parts works well. The material fact of the crucian carp’s pea-sized brain makes its ability to learn from experience all the more striking. Everyone knows what gills look like from the outside, but their corsetry, winnowed free from flesh, is a different matter. And a shark’s stomach turns out to be
surprisingly small but densely corrugated, as it is surface area, not volume, that counts when it comes to digestion.
With the complete specimens, however, there is little to help viewers understand what they are looking at. There aren’t any explanatory diagrams, or even illustrations of the animals as they might have appeared in life. (The show’s companion smartphone app does offer some media, but it is more entertaining than informative.)
Plastination can use colours to add visual appeal and highlight certain tissues. It also allows for poses both naturalistic and contrived – attributes used to spectacular effect at the Animal Inside Out exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum in 2012, for example. Here, though, the subjects’ stiff poses and bleached appearance give no hint of the elegant motion or vibrant colours we associate with marine life.
Once the initial shock and awe of seeing a whale shark’s innards had passed, my reaction to the parade of bloodless guts was mounting ennui. Without contextual information – age, sex, locale, distinguishing features, circumstances of death and collection – I found it hard to remember that this monochrome tableau is made up of remarkable animals, remarkably preserved, rather than waxworks in a slightly past-it museum.
Sea Creatures may offer sufficient gawping opportunities to satisfy those who just want to graze the surface of marine biology. But it is likely to frustrate those who would like to dive more deeply. ■
CULTURE
The deep blue, greyed outIt’s an eye-popping show of marine anatomy, but Sumit Paul-Choudhury longs to dive deeper
Ocean plastics: a sunfish preserved
using a plastination technique
“ Ocean dwellers from crabs to cuttlefish are here, as well as some 150 individual body parts”
SE
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ES
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 43
DON’T MISS
ReadNeurology and psychiatry come
together in The Disordered Mind:
What unusual brains tell us
about ourselves (Little, Brown),
a masterful summary of the field
by Nobel prizewinner Eric Kandel.
VisitRoll up to London’s Science
Museum at 6.45 pm BST on 29
August to celebrate 250 years
of the circus and uncover the
technical skills and science behind
the thrills of the big top.
SubscribeIn her podcast People Behind the
Science, Marie McNeely gets
scientists to share their stories.
The most recent episode features
Michael Levin of Tufts University,
Massachusetts, who studies the
decisions and computations that
occur in living systems.
PlayE-Line Media’s The Endless Mission
(pictured) puts the tools of game
creation on your screen. Use
templates and assets from other
built-in games, share creations
with other players or dip into theirs
via a central hub.
ListenIn BBC Radio 4’s Hotspot (1.45 pm
BST, 27 August), Jenny Kleeman
explores the stories behind some
startling place-based statistics.
Who knew the UK capital of
personal debt was Plymouth?
For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culture
“ A science of emotion must be cumulative since we don’t know the best level at which to understand it”
The Neuroscience of Emotion: A new
synthesis by Ralph Adolphs and David J. Anderson, Princeton University Press
IF YOU struggle to define your innermost feelings of love, lust, anger and jealousy, you are not alone – scientists are especially sloppy,
sometimes referring to emotions as feelings, at other times referring to internal states or behaviours.
Which is just one of the reasons why Ralph Adolphs and David Anderson have created a new framework for the study of emotion across species. In The Neuroscience of Emotion, the two Caltech professors sift through current studies of emotion, and provide a road map for the future.
Their analysis is authoritative and unsurpassed in its intricate examination of the field. It is also fluent, but don’t expect a frolic: this is a commanding textbook for scientists and students. The book may interest lay readers, but most will struggle – unless
multivariate analyses or representational geometry are your thing.
The early chapters are about what we don’t know and what we consistently get wrong, an in-depth view of our ignorance in which the authors imply we know almost nothing about how the brain produces emotion. This criticism continues throughout the book. I can imagine scientists despairing, overcome by the
futility of their past work and the enormity of future endeavours.
Light relief comes through famous historical cases, including Phineas Gage, the railroad worker whose behaviour changed after an iron pole was blasted through his brain, and SM, a woman whose rare brain lesion left her with little or no capacity to experience fear.
As the book progresses, it gets easier to read, with Adolphs and Anderson moving from how to understand the basic properties of emotion to the tools used to study animals and humans.
Emotional beingsWe know little about how emotions are made, says Helen Thomson
Understanding human emotion is
incredibly complex work
DE
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BA
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It ends by evaluating current theories and running through the questions still to be answered.
It is clear that understanding emotions will take a group effort. Emotion is an emergent property of a complex system of molecules, cells, circuits, networks and entire brains, say the authors. Since we don’t yet know the best level at which to understand it, a science of emotion must be cumulative, with all levels studied in parallel.
Part of the problem is that emotions are not material phenomena. The amygdala, for example, is often associated with fear: we can cut it out and impair some forms of fear. But put one in a dish, stimulate it as much as you like – and it would still be absurd to claim you are causing a state of fear. As the authors say: “Insofar as the amygdala generates fear, it can do so only within a complex network of other brain structures.”
The book is at its best with thought experiments. Try decoupling the word “emotion” from the “conscious experience of emotion”. Our everyday usage assumes conscious experience, but the science of emotion need not: is non-conscious emotion possible, in animals, humans, even robots?
Antonio Damasio, one of the foremost scientists in the field, calls this an “indispensable book”. For students and scientists willing to invest serious effort, I agree. But readers who want to learn how we use feelings to construct ourselves might feel more at home with Damasio’s book, The Strange Order of Things. ■
Helen Thomson is a consultant for New Scientist
44 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
Sandra, Gimlet Media, gimletmedia.com/sandra
HOW do we really know who is on the other end of conversations with digital assistants like Siri and Alexa? Just who is listening to our requests and questions, or accessing the vast troves of personal information we have given over to these companies? And does that kind of access affect both those handing over their details and the employees on the other end?
The podcast Sandra weaves these debates about ethics in technology into an engaging audio drama. The premise of the show is that a woman, Helen (played by Alia Shawkat), takes a job in which she pretends to be a virtual assistant named Sandra (voiced mechanically by Kristen Wiig), which has been created by a tech company called Orbital Teledynamics.
All the “Sandras”, as the company names the humans it pays to pretend to be artificial intelligences, are assigned a specialised topic to cover. To Helen’s confusion, she is assigned birds, but other Sandras she meets specialise in everything from the Enlightenment philosophers to movies starring Morgan Freeman.
She quickly finds that, while her personal life is a mess, as Sandra she can solve any problem, from buying doves for a pagan wedding to picking canary wallpaper for a nursery.
Early on, she and her supervisor Dustin (played by Ethan Hawke) bond over their love of being Sandra, describing it as a
“superpower”. Yet as is fairly usual when superpowers are involved, wielding them is nothing like as simple as it first appears. Dustin tells Helen to “trust the system”, reassuring her that Orbital wouldn’t put her in a situation it didn’t think she could handle, but she hits both highs and lows as she answers the questions put to her by users.
While the idea of a human pretending to be an AI may sound like a bit of a stretch, it is actually a real phenomenon. From start-ups to established outfits, companies have rolled out “AI” tools that later turn out to be powered by human intelligence, where people did everything from chatting with customers to transcribing personal information, such as receipts.
The humans performing these tasks are often bored and
frustrated, to the point of saying they are looking forward to being replaced by machines. And the humans interacting with this pseudo-AI have had to resort to developing their own tests to figure out whether they really are talking to a human or a machine.
All this is part of a bigger picture among tech companies. For many years it has been
acceptable to roll out unfinished products and reel in investors by overstating a product’s capabilities. This is a strategy that has been seen in companies like Theranos, which made false claims about its blood-testing technology in order to raise
millions of dollars from investors.Sandra also picks up on another
interesting trend in AI, something that is one of the attractions of the technology: people interact with it very differently than they do with other people. For example, when the US military used an AI therapist to screen homecoming service personnel for post-traumatic stress disorder, they found that it was more effective at getting people to discuss their symptoms honestly than either a human interview or a written questionnaire.
The customers in the show ask Helen and her fellow Sandras questions they probably wouldn’t dream of asking another person, like whether it is possible to get an allergy just by thinking about a food. But they also contact her just to have someone to talk to (or, in one case, to have someone for their parrot to talk to).
Unsurprisingly, some of the humans that Helen talks to as Sandra aren’t being straightforward about who they are and what they want either. Some do it to abuse her, a pattern we see when humans interact with AI in the real world. Others turn out to be doing it for more duplicitous reasons with more serious consequences.
What does Sandra have to say about a world that is full of AIs pretending to be human and humans pretending to be AIs? Well, you will have to listen to the whole show to find out, but it comes down to this: sooner or later, your lies will catch up with you, whether you are a human, an AI or something in between. ■
Sarah Leach is a freelance writer based in London
CULTURE
Searching for SandraWhat if AI assistants aren’t as artificial as they seem? Sarah Leach enjoys a new podcast
Just shut up! Many of us are
abusive to our digital assistants
“ The customers ask the Sandras questions they probably wouldn’t dream of asking another person”
JEN
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Principal Investigator
Department of PathologyBoston Children's Hospital
The Department of Pathology, Boston Children's Hospital, an
By October 1, 2018
Academic Fellowships
The Institute Fellowship Program at Harvard University
welcomes fellowship applications in natural sciences and
mathematics. The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
provides scientists the time and space to pursue their career’s
best work. At Radcliffe you will have the opportunity to
challenge yourself, meet and explore the work of colleagues in
other fields, and take advantage of Harvard’s many resources,
including the extensive library system. The Radcliffe Institute
Fellowship Program invites applications from people of all
genders, and from all countries. We seek to build a diverse
fellowship program.
Scientists in any field who have a doctorate in the area of the
proposed project (by December 201 ) and at least two
published articles or monographs are eligible to apply for a
Radcliffe Institute fellowship. The stipend amount of $77,500 is
meant to complement sabbatical leave salaries of faculty
members. Residence in the Boston area and participation in the
Institute community are required during the fellowship year.
Applications for 201 -20 are due by ber , 201 .
TENURE-TRACK ASSISTANT PROFESSORPHYSICAL CHEMISTRY
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Position Description: Candidates are invited to apply for a tenure-track assistant professorship in physical chemistry, broadly defined, including experimental and theoretical research in areas such as but not limited to atomic and molecular physics, biophysical chemistry, condensed matter, quantum science and ultrafast spectroscopy. The appointment is expected to begin on July 1, 2019. The tenure-track professor will be responsible for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. We are seeking candidates who have an outstanding research record and a strong commitment to undergraduate and graduate teaching.
Basic Qualifications: Doctorate or terminal degree in chemistry or related discipline required by the time the appointment begins.
Additional Qualifications: Demonstrated experience in teaching is desired.
Special Instructions: Please submit the following materials through the ARIeS portal (https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/8371). Applications must be submitted no later than October 15, 2018.
1. Cover letter2. Curriculum Vitae with publications list3. Teaching statement (describing teaching approach and philosophy)4. Outline of future research plans5. Names and contact information of 3-5 references. Three letters of
recommendation are required, and the application is complete only when all three letters have been received.
6. Selected publications
Contact Information: Susan M. Kinsella, Search Administrator, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, 12 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138. Phone: 617-496-4088. [email protected]
Harvard is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions, or any other characteristic protected by law.have been submitted.
Position Title: Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Req # 03779
The Department of Chemistry at The University of Chicago
invites applications for the position of Assistant Professor of
Chemistry in all areas of chemistry. Applicants must apply
online to the University of Chicago Academic Career website
at http://tinyurl.com/y9yhvxg9 and upload a cover letter, a
curriculum vitae with a list of publications, a succinct outline
of research plans, and a one page teaching statement. In
your cover letter, please specify one sub-discipline that best
represents your research interests (inorganic, materials,
organic, physical, and theoretical chemistry or chemical
biology). In addition, three reference letters are required. At the
time of hire the successful candidate must have completed
Joint appointments with other departments are possible.
Review of applications will begin on October 08, 2018 and
http://www.uchicago.edu/about/non_discrimination_statement/
Departments - Applicants who wish to conduct
research on topics of general interest to one or more of the
departments are encouraged to apply. Interdepartmental
research is also encouraged. The Departments are:
Applied Ocean Physics & Engineering
Biology
Geology & Geophysics
Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry
Physical Oceanography
A joint USGS/WHOI award will be given to a postdoc
whose research is in an area of common interest between
with both USGS and WHOI based advisors on their research.
The Center for Marine and Environmental will award a fellowship for research
environment including the study of their sources and fate or
use as tracers of ocean processes.
will award a
techniques in marine science radiocarbon studies.
project
will award a fellowship for research on midwater
ecosystems and processes, including biomass,
biodiversity, life histories and behavior, trophic
well as the Marine Policy Center.
primary emphasis placed on research promise. Scholarships
$60,000 per year, a wellness allowance and a modest research
budget. Recipients are encouraged to pursue their own
20, 2018 for the 2019/2020 appointments. Awards will be
research themes may be obtained through the Academic
www.whoi.edu/postdoctoral
Fellowships for Postdoctoral Scholars
accepted from doctoral recipients with research interests associated with the following:
2018
Picture yourself among one of the largest communities of underrepresented minorities in STEM during the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS)
Be a Part of ABRCMS to:
• Present your scientific research in one of
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research experiences, and professional
society opportunities
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than 350 colleges and universities, and
700 researchers, Program Directors, and
faculty members
Important DatesJudge Travel Award Deadline: July 20
Student Travel Award Deadline: August 22
Abstract Submission Deadline: September 7
Judges needed. If you know a postdoctoral scientist or faculty member who
is active in research, encourage them to participate as an ABRCMS poster and oral
presentation judge. Travel awards available. Learn more at www.abrcms.org/judges.
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
15%
Cell Biology11%
Chemistry6%
Microbiology 8%
Physiology4% Engineering,
Physics & Mathematics
4%
Social & Behavioral Sciences & Public
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DevelopmentalBiology & Genetics
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Neuroscience8%
NOVEMBER 14-17, 2018
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Funded by
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 49
newscientistjobs.com
The Department of Psychology anticipates making a tenure-track appointment
at the assistant professor level to begin July 1, 2019.
We seek candidates with core expertise in clinical psychology/clinical science
whose research programs also bridge to other domains in psychology,
neuroscience, or related disciplines. Our interest is less in specific areas than it
is in innovation and excellence. The appointment is expected to begin on July 1,
2019. Candidates at all levels are encouraged to apply.
Candidates must have a strong doctoral record and have completed their Ph.D.
Candidates should have demonstrated a promise of excellence in both research
and teaching. Teaching duties will include offerings at both undergraduate and
graduate levels.
Please submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research and teaching statements,
up to three representative reprints, and names and contact information
of three to five references. In addition, please arrange for three letters of
recommendation to be submitted to http://academicpositions.harvard.edu/
postings/8335. The application will be complete only when all three letters
have been submitted.
Questions regarding this position can be addressed to Jill Hooley at
[email protected]. The committee will consider completed applications
starting immediately on a rolling basis through October 1. We expect to begin
conducting Interviews in October and November.
We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions or any other character-istic protected by law.
The Department of Psychology anticipates making a tenure-track appointment at the assistant professor level to begin July 1, 2019.
We seek candidates with expertise in developmental cognitive science, broadly conceived. Our interest is less in specific topic areas or methods than in innovation and excellence in the applicant’s research program. For instance, in addition to experimental behavioral research on human children, successful candidates might employ cognitive neuroscience, animal cognition, cross-cultural ethnographic work or computational modeling, among approaches. Topics of study might include perception, action planning, conceptual representation, social cognition, reasoning, decision-making or language, among other topics. We seek candidates whose research complements research already going on in the Department, taking it in clearly new directions. The appointment is expected to begin on July 1, 2019. Candidates at all levels are encouraged to apply. Candidates must have a strong doctoral record and have completed their Ph.D. Candidates should have demonstrated a promise of excellence in both research and teaching. Teaching duties will include offerings at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
Please submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research and teaching statements, up to three representative reprints, and names and contact information of three to five references (three letters of recommendation are required, and the application is complete only when all three letters have been submitted) to http://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/8336.
Questions regarding this position can be addressed to [email protected]. The committee will consider completed applications starting immediately and on a rolling basis until September 15. Interviews will be conducted in October and November.
We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions or any other characteristic protected by law.
NRC Research Associateship ProgramsThe National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers postdoctoral and senior research awards on behalf of 23 U.S. federal research agencies and affiliated institutions with facilities at over 100 locations throughout the U.S. and abroad. We are actively seeking highly qualified candidates including recent doctoral recipients and senior researchers. Applications are accepted during 4 annual review cycles (with deadlines of February 1, May 1, August 1, November 1).
Interested candidates should apply online http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/RAP/PGA_046398
Awardees have the opportunity to:� conduct independent research in an area compatible with the interests of the sponsoring laboratory� devote full-time effort to research and publication� access the excellent and often unique facilities of the federal research enterprise� collaborate with leading scientists and engineers at the sponsoring laboratories
Benefits of an NRC Research Associateship award include:� 1 year award, renewable for up to 3 years� Stipend ranging from $45,000 to $80,000, higher for senior researchers� Health insurance, relocation benefits, and professional travel allowance
DESIRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCEApplicants should hold, or anticipate receiving, an earned doctorate in science or engineering. Degrees from universities abroad should be equivalent in training and research experience to a degree from a U.S. institution. Some awards are open to foreign nationals as well as to U.S. citizens and permanent residents.
ABOUT THE EMPLOYERThe National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Fellowships Office has conducted the NRC Research Associateship Programs in cooperation with sponsoring federal laboratories and other research organizations approved for participation since 1954. Through national competitions, the Fellowships Office recommends and makes NRC Research Associateship awards to outstanding postdoctoral and senior scientists and engineers for tenure as guest researchers at participating laboratories. A limited number of opportunities are available for support of graduate students in select fields.
| NewScientist | 25 August 2018
newscientistjobs.com
50
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 51
newscientistjobs.com
School of Medicine-Open Rank-Radiation Oncology
The Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is seeking one or two
Ph.D. level scientists with expertise in immune-oncology or DNA repair at the level of Assistant/Associate
Professor. This is a tenure earning position. Our goal is the delivery of technically advanced radiotherapy
in combination with anew agents developed in the laboratory to enhance cancer care and provide
treatment in a pleasing and educational environment.
Current recruiting activities are focused on individuals with interest in translational and clinical research.
They will have the opportunity to interface with a collaborative group of clinical faculty and laboratory
scientists. The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is a comprehensive urban university with
worldwide for its outstanding research and patient care as well as its innovative educational programs.
To learn more about UAB and Birmingham, Alabama, please visit www.uab.edu or www.uab.edu/radonc.
You will join 23 other faculty members in the Department of Radiation Oncology.
The Department is part of the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center, a NCI designated
Comprehensive Cancer Center. Salary to be commensurate with experience and ability.
Please contact Dr. James A. Bonner at [email protected] for more information.
Interested applicants are encouraged to apply online:
uab.peopleadmin.com/postings/1826
View details online at:
jobs.newscientist.com/job/1401650756
52 | NewScientist | 25 August 201852 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
[email protected] @newscientist newscientistLETTERS
When and where is an infection a bad thing?
From Steve Dalton,Chipstead, Kent, UKStephanie Woodcock responds to your review of Edward Bullmore’s The Inflamed Mind by suggesting we should consider the role of infection when looking at the link between inflammation and depression (Letters, 28 July). This prompted me to consider the natural state for humans.
Have we adapted to be most healthy when dealing with a typical background of non-life-threatening infections? Perhaps an infection-free body would compromise our health in ways we can’t predict.
It is clear that there are many interrelated areas where better knowledge could help: the make-up and function of our microbiome; which bacteria
are friends and which foes; the role of the enteric nervous system in the gut and serotonin; the relationship between these things and anxiety and between anxiety and depression, exercise and lifestyle; other environmental and social factors; the immune system... and so it goes on.
I wonder how much an implicit assumption that any and all infections are bad might colour infection-related research.
From Denise Taylor,London, UKWoodcock asks for consideration of infection, as well as mental adversity, causing inflammation leading to depression. Bullmore does contend that underlying inflammatory physical conditions could trigger some depression. He suspects too many practitioners look only at psychological stress, rather than a directly physical
From Pat Sheil,Sydney, AustraliaLeah Crane informs us that if we want to send probes to Uranus and Neptune, we had best get a wriggle on to make the next launch window in the late 2020s and early 2030s (28 July, p 40). If we miss this opportunity, we have to wait until
EDITOR’S PICK
2050 to get close-up images and data from these far-flung icy orbs.
As Crane notes, this would require a quick decision on funding if such probes are to be designed, built and launched in time. How can we best make the case for the cash? Well, there is nothing like a snappy brand name for a project. Usually these seem to be cute and appropriate acronyms to sell a mission concept.
In 2027, we will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the death of Pierre-Simon Laplace who – among many other achievements – proposed the nebula hypothesis of the origins of the planets. This occasion happens to fall during the launch window. Let’s call the spacecraft the Ice Giants Laplace Orbiting Observatories.
Ah! IGLOO – what member of Congress could resist funding that?
A cool proposal to fund an ice giant mission
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25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 5325 August 2018 | NewScientist | 53
“ Autism does give some of us amazing abilities but for most autistic folk it is debilitating”
cause for depression. So he does include infection as a cause of inflammation and depression.
Mixed messages about biodiversity can do harm
From Sally Johnson,Hinksey Hill, Oxfordshire, UKGraham Lawton rightly sets about unpicking some assertions about loss of biodiversity (28 July, p 28). But he bases the discussion on whether biodiversity really is in a crisis largely on extinction rates and on whether planetary boundaries have been exceeded.
He pays little attention to the loss and degradation of natural habitat. Only by sustaining large areas of habitat will saving a range of species be possible.
Current threats – population growth, illegal wildlife trade and uncontrolled conversion of natural areas – are challenging.
If biodiversity loss is to be halted, change is desperately needed.
It is not about saving the odd endangered species from the brink. It requires a dramatic shift from traditional to sustainable investments, better land use planning, the protection of large landscapes and intact habitats, and better management of natural resources. There are challenging conversations to be had about how we realistically achieve this without affecting the rights of others.
Stories of conservation successes are welcome, but questioning whether there are enough data to assess the current state of biodiversity can engender complacency.
It also risks sowing the seeds of doubt and preventing the loss of biodiversity becoming a burning issue for governments and the private sector.
In some places, Aboriginal people did live in towns, notably in western Victoria, where eels were farmed, smoked and traded, and people lived in stone-walled huts.
In more arid areas settling down wasn’t an attractive option and in the tropics there was no need.
Can mobile phone masts back up GPS satellites?
From Perry Bebbington,Kimberley, Nottinghamshire, UKStephen Battersby discusses proposals to prevent or detect spoofing of GPS signals (7 July, p 32). What about using mobile phone cell sites? Of course they are only of use on land, but they are numerous and fixed.
A system using them would be very difficult to effectively spoof as it would be necessary to convincingly spoof all the cell
Bread was a treat in what is now Australia long ago
From Steven Johns,Axedale, Victoria, AustraliaYou report Amaia Arranz-Otaegui’s discovery of bread crumbs that predate farming by a few millennia at Shubayqa in Jordan (21 July, p 6). You find it curious that bread doesn’t seem to have become a staple food in the Stone Age.
Aboriginal Australian people were harvesting grass seeds, native rice and nardoo fern “seeds”, grinding them into flour and baking unleavened “bread” for, probably, tens of thousands of years before this.
It is unsurprising that this wasn’t a staple food in a hunter-gatherer society. Making it would require a large surplus of a seasonal resource and storage facilities – thus a settled existence.
kevin responds to the proposition that autism can bring extra
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54 | NewScientist | 25 August 201854 | NewScientist | 25 August 2018
[email protected] @newscientist newscientistLETTERS
sites around the area you wanted to affect. One signal indicating a position that didn’t fit in with the others from the same area would stand out as obviously wrong.
Beyond belief and also beyond cash measures
From Patrick Davey,Dublin, IrelandI was intrigued by Gregory Paul’s discussion of the relationship between religion and economic development (28 July, p 24). But economics can be used to measure well-being up to a relatively low level of income (28 July 2012, p 40) As countries or communities become more unequal in wealth distribution, measures of well-being such as health decline (24 October 2015, p 26).
Anecdotally, caring and mutual support decline as wealth increases, possibly because they are no longer seen as necessary or because we become more isolated and less aware of the needs of others. Money is nothing more than a lubricant facilitating complex exchange systems not possible with barter.
From John Cantellow, Derby, UKPaul asks why non-theistic countries are more successful. But how should we measure “success”? Finland, for example, is ranked top in the 2018 World Happiness report but 42nd by gross domestic product. The US is ranked top by GDP but only 18th for happiness.
Religions value compassion, which promotes happiness. In contrast, economic success comes through valuing money, which promotes competition, a source of unhappiness.
Resist the stinky call of the metropolis!
From Christopher Connell,Meols, Wirral, UKYou mention the somewhat toxic site you have chosen for your head office (Leader, 21 July). You say that the congestion and air pollution is replicated across the country. It’s quite nice where I am.
You use authors from all over the world, so why insist on being in London, the dirtiest part of the UK? You might also consider holding your New Scientist Live
events at a central location – London is not central, unless you live there.
The true odds of getting to a very advanced age
From Steven Goldberg,New York, USTom Kirkwood points out that 105 is the first age at which the probability of reaching the next birthday falls below 50 per cent and illustrates the odds of living beyond this to the record age of 122 by asking who has ever tossed 17 heads in a row (7 July, p 24). This is a satisfactory rough-and-ready estimate, but it is far less likely than that, because each year the chance of reaching the next birthday drops dramatically.
A call for clarity in reporting visual acuity
From Alex McDowell, London, UKCatherine de Lange reports a virtual reality headset improving users’ vision “to 20/30, which is pretty close to 20/20 vision” (4 August, p 4). In the UK, doctors and opticians now use a metric
Letters should be sent to: Letters to the Editor, New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES Email: [email protected]
Include your full postal address and telephone number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to articles. We reserve the right to edit letters. New Scientist Ltd reserves the right to use any submissions sent to the letters column of New Scientist magazine, in any other format.
TOM GAULD
measure of visual acuity: “6/9 vision” means being able to read at 6 metres what one should, nominally, be able to read at 9 metres; “20/30” is the equivalent when distances are measured in feet.
Several binds that follow from wearing ties
From Eric Clow,Grimsby, Lincolnshire, UKBrian Horton mentions doctors’ ties carrying germs (Letters, 28 July). When I was a medical student in the 1950s, I noticed that gastroenterologists, obstetricians and gynaecologists tended to wear bow ties rather than knotted ties to protect themselves, rather than the patient.
From Gordon Drennan,Burton, South AustraliaSomeone say it: we all know what a tie is. Just look at it sticking up from the top of trousers with a knot on the end. It says “I have a penis so I get to give the orders.” I find it laughable that the people who wear them can’t see that this is what they’re saying. If you point it out they take it very badly.
For the record
Cold fact: the amount of carbon
dioxide needed to make a Martian
atmosphere is about a million cubes
of dry ice each 1 kilometre across
(4 August, p 6).
Alfred Russel Wallace was racked
by yellow fever during his South
American expedition of 1848–1852
and studied birds of paradise in the
Malay archipelago in 1854-1862
(28 July, p 44).
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 55
For more Makes, visit newscientist.com/make
Slam dunk the junkLousy aim? Hone your trash-throwing arm with the help of a team of friendly robots
“The World Cup may be over
for another four years, but that
doesn’t stop my wife yelling
‘goal!’ every time she throws
something in the bin. Except
she’s a worse shot than Nicolai
Jørgensen,” says Will Junker.
“We end up with mounds of
wayward rubbish – definitely a
foul situation, and the penalty
is mine: I have to pick it up.
Can tech referee this match?”
England fans may have cheered “football’s coming home”, but I don’t think they meant turning their kitchens into playing fields. You might not be able to break your wife out of this habit, but you can move the goalposts to give her the best chance of a winning shot.
A net atop your bin is no good – teabags and other soggy missiles could get stuck. My next thought was a big target and funnel, like the oversized bins you find at fast food drive-throughs. But that leaves your rubbish uncovered and free to waft – more suited to car parks than kitchens.
What’s needed is a helping hand. A sheet of heat-mouldable plastic can easily be fashioned into a makeshift mitt. This covers the bin when not in
use, and can lift up to act as a large backboard when scoring. I added a couple of servo motors flanking the hinges – attack and defence. One pulls a string that winches up the lid, the second gives it a kick in the other direction so it swings closed.
Now for a way to signal that you are ready to shoot. Like the best team players, I opted to rely on shouting to my nearest teammate – in this case, Alexa.
Recruiting Alexa required a bit of tinkering. I turned to a web service called IFTTT, which links internet-connected devices. Now when I tell Alexa to open the bin, she relays this instruction to a website. A Wi-Fi-connected microcontroller attached to the servos constantly checks that site to see if Alexa has left it any messages and, if so, tells the motors to get moving.
You are limited in part by how fast your internet is. On slower connections you might want to shout for the bin before you have finished brewing your tea.
Just one bug remains: when I sink a winning shot, I’ve still not convinced Alexa to join in my goal celebrations. Hannah Joshua ■
25 August 2018 | NewScientist | 55
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MORE human jobs lost to AI – that is,
Avian Intelligence. The Puy du Fou
theme park in the west of France has
hired six corvids to pick up litter. The
rooks have been trained to retrieve
cigarette butts and other small bits
of detritus, which they can deposit
in a box to earn a food reward.
So far, so good. But Feedback
suspects the site owners may be
underestimating their feathered
employees. How long before the
six birds grow tired of working for
chicken feed and decide to unionise?
Or will the canny corvids begin
subcontracting the work to sparrows,
taking a cut for themselves? A paper
on the economic policies of the bird
kingdom is surely not far away.
GOING down like a lead balloon: a suspicious package attached to a red parachute fell from the skies over New Jersey causing alarm,
thanks to a note stuck to it with a message for US President Donald Trump. The note read: “NASA Atmospheric Research Instrument NOT A BOMB!… If this lands near the President, we at NASA wish him a great round of golf.” The president was indeed staying at a golf resort nearby. Police intercepted the package, which they say was making a hissing sound.
NASA confirmed that the device was one of six weather balloons launched to measure ozone. The note was a “misguided attempt to be lighthearted” by a student researcher, who has since been removed from the project.
DO YOU struggle to get out of bed
in the morning? Spare a thought for
Homo erectus, an early species of
human that researchers claim went
extinct through laziness. (It’s lucky
you can’t libel the dead – or extinct
species.) Ceri Shipton of the
Australian National University found
stone tools were typically made by
H. erectus with whatever rocks were
to hand, despite there being better
stone available nearby.
From this, Shipton reaches the
conclusion that H. erectus followed
“a least-effort” strategy. Twinned
with an inability to adapt to a
changing environment, this sealed
their demise. “The environment
around them was changing, but they
were doing the exact same things
with their tools,” says Shipton. Thank
goodness Homo sapiens would never
make such a foolish mistake…
WHEN is a lake not a lake? When it is the Caspian Sea.
The world’s largest enclosed body of water has seen decades of wrangling between the five countries lying on its shores. Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Iran are all keen to exploit the oil and gas deposits beneath the body of water. If the Caspian is a sea, territorial claims only extend a certain distance from the shoreline. But if the Caspian is a lake, no such rules hold, and the countries are free to divide up the oil fields.
Now the nations have reached an agreement. The wet bit of the Caspian will be treated as a sea, available for common use, while the land underneath is a lake bed, which will be carved up. This means these five nations will be the first you can reach from international waters by swimming straight downwards.
BROWSING a copy of BBC Focus
magazine, Don Dennis was alarmed
to read about a hospital sanitation
robot that “can eliminate virtually all
organisms in just 10 minutes, using
the power of ultraviolet radiation”.
There’s only one metal monster
we know of capable of that level of
extermination, Don. Are you sure you
weren’t reading that other fine BBC
title, Doctor Who Magazine?
WITH much of Australia in drought, Tim McCulloch is informed by the Australian Broadcasting Network that “the official forecast is that there is a 50 per cent chance the rainfall over the next 12 months will be less than the median”. Isn’t that a given, he says. Well, they’re not wrong. Who said long-term forecasts were unpredictable?
WEARING clothes made of fur and
leather is so passé, darling. Why not
instead wear a garment made from
an extinct animal? Vladimir Ammosov,
from Yakutsk, Siberia, acquired a bag
of woolly mammoth hair, had it
verified at the local mammoth
museum, and hired a hat maker to
crochet it into a Yakutian style hat.
It’s basically a beanie made of the
most itchy material you can imagine.
“I kept looking at the bag, wondering
what to do with the hair, and then
thought why not try to make a hat?”
says Ammosov. Better than a G-string,
we suppose.
AND finally, cows in Sweden are celebrating the ruling that they are allowed to visit nudist beaches. Vaxjo’s Culture and Leisure Department ruled the cows “have just as much right to be there as the human visitors”. A representative from the Vaxjo herd confirmed to Feedback that the bovids are looking forward to mooving in.
For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedbackFEEDBACK
You can send stories to Feedback by email at [email protected]. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.
Reader Joanne Wheeler finds herself puzzled by the many jigsaws available to buy on Amazon that are marked by the website as “no assembly required”. “They must be very boring puzzles,” she says
PA
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Last words past and present at newscientist.com/lastword
THE LAST WORD
Load of rubbish
Rubbish collection seems complicated
these days. Where I live, I use five
different bins and the collections are
fortnightly. Unlike many people I
observe, I squash things like aluminium
cans and plastic milk bottles. It seems
logical and reduces the volume of
rubbish stored in the house – but does
doing so help collection and recycling?
■ Most material recovery facilities use conveyor belts. First, magnets detect metal, but the remaining materials are processed by shape. Flat things are considered to be cardboard; 3D objects are glass (which smashes), plastic or aluminium. This metal isn’t magnetic but can be separated using electric eddy currents induced by a magnetic field. Very flat items will not make it to this sorting stage.
So flattening cans and plastic bottles can lead to them being processed as cardboard, rather than the materials they are. Sophisticated material recovery facilities use lasers, weights and buoyancy to separate materials, but these are not commonplace.
More beneficial is to wash your items. Any smell in the bin is likely to be food remnants, not aluminium or plastic. And never put plastic bags in recycling, unless you live in one of the few areas that can deal with them.Marty MiddlebrookPlanet Ark Environmental FoundationSydney, Australia
■ In the 1970s, I worked in a large hospital. In order to reduce the space that waste took up, the management bought a compactor to reduce it to bales. But the idea was short-lived because the first collection was declined. The refuse firm also had compactors. Already-compacted waste gave its compactors indigestion.Roger MilesSt Albans, Hertfordshire, UK
■ Most collection vehicles compress the rubbish as they go along.Alastair MouatBy email, no address supplied
Dazzle hassle?
Are the bright lights that cyclists now
use safe for the eyes of onlookers?
■ Many people permanently damage their eyesight by looking at the sun through binoculars. The damage is done not by the light, but by the heat from the infrared radiation in the sun’s rays. The lens in the eye focuses both the visible light and the invisible heat on to the light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye. The heat is so strong that cells can overheat and be damaged in only a second.
The bright lights used by cyclists are LEDs, which produce a lot of light but almost no heat, so having one shine in your eyes won’t damage the cells in the eye. However, that doesn’t mean the experience is risk-free.
The iris expands and contracts to alter the amount of light entering the eye through the pupil. It contracts quickly on exposure to bright light but expands slowly if the light is removed.
Night vision in humans occurs when the iris is dilated and the cells at the back of the eye have
adapted to the low light. It can take a long time to establish, but can be suddenly lost with a flash of bright light. If this happens, visible things become invisible, and the risk of bumping into things grows.
This effect is sometimes manipulated in night-time orienteering, where it is important to retain night vision for running and reading a compass and map.
Incidents suggest people try to secure an unfair advantage by switching on their LED headband 15 seconds before the start and turning around, dazzling as many competitors as possible.
To combat this, some people wear dark glasses with side shields and only take them off after the start, or carry a mirror!Andrew Carruthers Beaconsfield, Quebec, Canada
■ When you step outdoors on a bright, sunny day, you often experience discomfort and partial blindness until your eyes adapt to the illumination. Temporary blindness also occurs when you
walk indoors on a sunny day. Using the exposure reading on
my digital camera, I compared the illumination of a room with large windows on a shady side of my house with the outdoors on a bright sunny day. The outdoors scene is 400 times brighter (or 400 times as many lumens).
Looking directly at an LED reflector light bulb, probably brighter than a bicycle’s, at a distance of 1 metre, it is just eight times brighter than my room on a bright day, or a 50th of the brightness of my outdoor scene.
Your eyes are in no danger from even the brightest bicycle light. It might appear painfully bright, but this is because you are usually looking at it with dark-adapted eyes. In daylight, it would not be so bright. In fact, I can barely make out the spot of light my powerful LED torch makes on a sunny wall. Peter BursztynBarrie, Ontario, Canada
This week’s question
COUNTED OUT
I remember being told that when you see a flash of lightning and start counting until you hear the thunderclap, the number you have counted to will amount to the number of miles distant the storm is. Is this true? If not, is there any way of calculating the distance based on the observed time difference between lightning and thunder?Alice CatlingLondon, UK
We pay £25 for every answer published in New Scientist. To answer a question or ask a new one please email [email protected]. Questions should be scientific enquiries about everyday phenomena, and both questions and answers should be concise. We reserve the right to edit items for clarity and style. Please include a postal address, daytime telephone number and email address.
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“Night vision can take a long time to be established but can be lost in a second with a flash of light”
